Jónsi (of Sigur Rós and Jónsi & Alex) returns to NYC! Following the release of his debut solo album, Go, this past April, Jónsi promptly started a worldwide tour across North America and Europe, featuring songs from the album plus other selections. His tour visits NYC on November 10th at Manhattan Center's Hammerstein Ballroom with special guest Mountain Man.


Jón "Jónsi Þór Birgisson is best known as lead vocalist and guitarist for Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Rós and one part of two man multimedia project, Jonsi & Alex, formerly known as Riceboy Sleeps.

Although it all did start out on just guitar, piano and harmonium, acoustic isn't the first word that springs to mind when listening to Go, the first solo album from Sigur Rós frontman, Jónsi. Joyous, exhilarating and fearless, maybe. Ecstatic, dramatic and alive, perhaps. As an album it's more wild extravaganza than solipsistic rumination. Much of the way it has grown and evolved has to do with Jónsi's choice of free-spirited collaborators. All the album's arrangements are by Nico Muhly, the Philip Glass protege known for his work with Björk, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, Antony & the Johnsons and Grizzly Bear. Nico is all over Go, his exuberant, flitting arrangements for strings, brass and woodwind a dizzying counterpoint to Jónsi's broadened vocal range. The off-kilter and original percussive style of Finnish drummer Samuli Kosminen, sometime member of Múm and owner of a suitcase full of magical crap, added another fascinating layer to the album. With the help of his Riceboy Sleeps collaborator and boyfriend, Alex Somers, Jónsi narrowed down the folder of material from 25 to a core of 11 songs and headed off to record with Peter Katis at his Tarquin Studios in Connecticut in Spring 2009. There, Jónsi made the decision to go for broke and "scale up" rather than rein in the material, and so this minimally-conceived album came to be about "everything." Go completes a personal journey for Jónsi away from the wordless and near-brutal sonic monoliths of Sigur Rós' untitled ( ) album, and is a bold stride beyond the career-redefining pop of Hoppipolla, and even the explosive percussive assault of the last album's "Gobbledigook." His voice has never been more impressive or breathtakingly arranged; here spectral and wraithlike, there fulsome and gorgeously warm, or else with backing vocals swooping and darting everywhere in a giddying array of crazed inventiveness.



Mountain Man is a creature growing from the mouths of: Molly Erin Sarle, Alexandra Sauser-Monnig, Amelia Randall Meath. Their debut album, Made the Harbor was released earlier this year.




Jonsi  |  Mountain Man