Bardi JOHANNSSON

Producer / Composer / Arranger / Musician

I dream of Iceland, a distant island, where the minds are high from having opened too wide and where girls with heavy breasts, their eyes drowned in liquor, let go of themselves in pools of simmering water. I see their arms extended like crosses, their arms wrapped around the edges, their thankful breasts. I also hear voices, lyrical choirs, summons. And then Bardi appears. Bardi, Bang Gang's singer: his sinking eyes and his floating silhouette. The brainy geek glasses on the outlandish features. It's all there: a work addict and a short-circuited madman. A bird-like UFO, directly issued from good old pop music and death metal to get to this – the purely orgasmic sky of this soaring record, between the Beach Boys and film soundtracks: sublime beings gathering in view of the orgy of the century but too conflicted in their hearts. There is also the Go-Betweens removing their dark glasses to see the sun as it swallows the clouds like liquid joy. It's pure light, this second record, light at the end of the sound. You have to hear Bardi imploring Where We Reach The Sky, you have to hear him repeating It Gets Me Higher on a few piano notes and an acoustic guitar. You have to take the time to understand it's not electronic music. It's almost all instruments, a flute, a filled trumpet, a keyboard for us to finger the unreal light, the growing desire to come down and console the others. Only then does a weightless beat start its course, a few stifled scratches and Bardi's voice again, obsessive: in beauty sometimes it's sadness that stupefies us, the unbearable sadness of these twelve slow tracks, of these slow-motion descents. I Can Feel What Is Wrong. That's what she sings to him, that's what she tells him in the piece that gives its title to the album. In the far-out television show that Bardi co-hosted, he'd pretend to be sleeping time away when great Icelandic authors listened to themselves talking a bit too much. He'd show his body. Viewers complained. He took revenge in lining up vocal guests with Keren Ann, with Phoebe or Daniel Agust, Gus Gus' former singer. Sadness and joy. 1% of the Iceland population bought his first record to hear this voice in which both respond to each other, precisely. But he kept moving forward from interviews to radio extravaganzas. He doesn't want to talk about Björk. He doesn't want to become a star. Just pursue his sound diving, his apnea in the outdoors. Just jump in the pool with his two bottles of champagne. Still wearing his sunglasses.