Riceboy Sleeps - Riceboy Sleeps (2009)

Riceboy Sleeps is a new side project of Sigur Ros vocalist Jónsi and Alex Somers. It's instrumental ambient music at it's greatest, with the pair performing on a variety of instruments backed by a string quartet and a full choir. The music is very dreamy; it's like music to dream to. Riceboy Sleeps takes the sound from Sigur Ros and turns into an ethereal, calmer sound, creating a wonderful album in the process. It's an album to listen to under a tree in a sunny field in the middle of nowhere on a nice summer day while dozing on and off. Personally, I actually like this more than anything Sigur Ros ever did, to be completely honest with you. It is also clearly takes influences from experimental music, but rather than creating some bizarre work of music does so in a way that, mixed with the slow, quiet, ethereal strings/ambient pad sound present throughout the entire album just adds to the beauty while offering more to keep the listener focused on the music (Stokkseyri). Never fast, but never painfully slow; never too repetitve, but allows you to absorb everything; never bizarre, but containing experimental elements like the fast piano roll in Stokkseyri or the animal growls and strange sounds at the end of Howl; the duo has found the perfect way to combine the music of Sigur Ros with dreamy music to create a beautiful blend of post rock, experimental, and ambient.