Árni Grétar is best known for his ambient and ambient-adjacent electronica as Futuregrapher. It’s been a decade since I first saw him perform live, set up in a bookstore at an Iceland Airwaves off-venue show during which he combined electronic music with a reading Icelandic poetry, and I’ve remained fascinated listening to him push the edges and boundaries of ambient music ever since. He also oversees some prolific indie labels, most notably Intellitronic Bubble and Móatún 7. How prolific? I’m not precisely sure, but based on Discogs listings alone the two labels have combined for over 30 releases so far in 2024, with more formally scheduled. And lest you think, “oh, well putting out digital stuff isn’t so hard,” many of these get the physical media treatment across a range of formats – vinyl, cassette, and CD.
In March Móatún 7 announced a massive compilation to celebrate the label’s fifth anniversary. Entilted V Ættir, a hundred tracks were spread over four releases – a 7″ record, a 12″ record, a cassette, and a 5-CD box set. While I’m normally a vinyl guy, I opted to buy the box set as a stand-alone. It arrived a few weeks ago and I’d held off playing it until I was in the right frame of mind, which it turned out happened this morning after finding myself wide awake at 3:30AM on a Saturday, unable to get back to sleep. This seemed like the perfect thing to get me up and moving on a dark, wet Seattle morning as I made my first cup of coffee and set about doing some chores around the house.
Let’s start with the packaging. It’s well constructed with the lid incorporated into the box design. The five CDs are nestled inside full-color sleeves, each featuring an image capturing Iceland’s natural beauty. It’s both attractive and elegant in its simplicity. There’s no need for a booklet or any deep explanation – the music speaks for itself. And with 78 tracks by almost as many individual artists from across the globe, it has a lot to say.
How do you effectively write about such a massive compilation? You probably can’t… or at least I can’t. It leans ambient, but it casts a wide sonic net. Some tracks are more house, others more techno, and others still test more experimental waters. The high points will depend upon your individual taste, but regardless of where you fall on the electronic music spectrum you’ll find things to like. GB EDGE’s “Orbital Encounters” on the first disc reached out of the speakers and grabbed me by the ears, its minimal techno infused with space-related audio clips to conjure images of early sci-fi films. Disc two takes things in a more experimental, less beat-driven direction, songs like Reptilicus’ “Eye Like W” absolutely melting my brain with its dark electro current pulsing like some evil quasar (though we’re later treated to the upbeat “Slow Koffie” by TV-99-AD, a song that will immediately put a smile on your face, so it’s not all edgy). The third CD is a collection of artists from Móatún 7’s MO_ACID series, providing a sense of continuity across the 17 tracks, a high point being Krystian Shek’s 808-infused “Pizza Boy”, which begs to be used in a film scene with the antagonist stalking a potential victim, or perhaps trying to evade a tail on a dark night. There are some super trippy vibes on this disc for sure and I can’t get enough. The fourth CD leans atmospheric, compositions like Nacht Plank’s “Tape” creating undulating soundscapes. The final disc is given over entirely to Icelandic artists and includes some of my favorites – Skurken, Ohm, ThorF, Bistro Boy… a great overview of the Icelandic scene (no shade intended to the Icelandic artists who appear on the other four CDs, amazing talents like ThizOne, Stereo Hypnosis, Biogen, Yagya, and countless others). You can pick any one of these five discs at random, slide it into your CD player, and hit “Play”, and I can guarantee you 75 minutes of excellence that will never see you reaching for the “Track” button to skip a single song.
The V Ættir box set was released in an edition of 100 copies and it’s already sold out on the Móatún 7 Bandcamp page, so it’ll be a tough one to track down. But if you come across a copy, grab it with both hands and hold it tight. You’ll forget about the money you spent as soon as you press “Play”.