Sam Slater Announces ‘Wrong Airport Ghost’ Album, Shares Live Session From Sigur Rós’ Studio

In March of this year, Hildur Gudnadóttir and I flew into Reykjavík. It was a somber occasion, as our friend and colleague Jóhann Jóhannsson had just recently passed away and we were going to the funeral. A friend of ours, Icelandic composer Kjartan Holm, invited us into Sigur Ros' studio that's behind the harbor to work on live versions of two tracks from my forthcoming album. We decided to take material from two of the more abstract / textural tracks on the album: "Noland" and "Subway Lion". We took the main thematic elements and began to stretch and reinterpret them using acoustic instruments. Hildur, Kjartan and I worked off simple motifs to bring the original layouts to life.

These themes and ideas had begun as fairly loose / exploratory recordings with the Indian musician Krishna Bhopa, whom I spent time with in Rajastahn in 2016. Since then, the pieces hadn’t lived beyond a computer so it was really exciting to take these heavily processed  ideas and give them space in a room. The tracks are melodic, but not really in tune, so we reached for fretless instruments, which creates these really weighty flows of sounds; Kjartan going for slide guitar and Hildur going for her custom-built, self-feedbacking cello, the Dorophone. These forces were fed into the modular synth and it manipulated the original material leaving these two versions as the result. This was the only take done with Blair's camera on - we just piled into playing what we'd been working on, and we did everything in one pass. Hopefully, that excitement is present in the recording / camera work, too.