On Repetition in Ragnar Kjartansson and The National's A Lot of Sorrow

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Notes

¹ Not all of Kjartansson's work, including his work with music, is repetitive. A strong example here was his 16 January 2015 performance An Evening of Misery at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. Kjartansson performed a number of songs (once each!) with his collaborator, the pianist Davíð Þór Jónsson, in what could reasonably be called a traditional, though very diverse, concert – if not for its art gallery context (see http://www.ago.net/villatoronto).

² More directly, in conversation with Sabine Mirlesse for Bomb Magazine (2013), Kjartansson states, ‘All these pieces are just sound sculptures honestly.’

³ These and similar modifiers appear throughout Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation (see Baudrillard 1994).

⁴ Notably, Steve Reich, another of the prominent original minimalist composers, conceptualized and attempted to mechanically carry out slowing down and freezing sound before realizing its impossibility. See his 1967 essay ‘Slow-Motion Sound’ (2000: 26–9). His piece Four Organs essentially runs through the concept manually.