It’s easy to see why Sindri Mar Sigfusson of the Icelandic dream-pop septet Seabear thinks of music as a living thing that connects people.
If you go
Seabear with Via Tania and Soley
Where: Black Cat, 1811 14th St. NW
When: 9 p.m. Tuesday
Info: $10 advance, $12 day of show; ticketmaster.com
The music on the band’s sophomore release “We Built A Fire” is something akin to a soundtrack of a lovely dream, so powerful and haunting are the experimental/indie-folk songs. Think of Andreas Vollenveider with a more contemporary element and you have the right idea. “I don’t think we really talked about that we just some of the songs on the album we just playing them live and kind of developed like that,” he said. ” … then after that we played together as a band for like three years, gotten used to playing with each other kind of let things happen naturally in the practice space.”
That’s saying a lot when you consider the strikingly different backgrounds of the band members. Some studied music since they were very young, others call themselves pure amateurs.
The connection among all of them, of course, is the lilting sound that combines to make their songs almost experimental yet very familiar almost at the same time.
That’s not to say that each song is a triumph in the tradition of New Age jam.
Sigfusson said that while the band didn’t have a strong master plan for the music when it began performing what would become the album, there were also some songs that were left out.
“There were a few songs that didn’t go very far,” he said. “It look two long years, on and off, but we’d do a session, then wait some time and go back to it. We probably did five or six songs as demos that didn’t go any farther but they may be something for the future.”
That’s fine as far as Sigfusson is concerned. The point of music is to approach it almost like a living organism and let it evolve. That’s something he has been dong all of his life.
“I have been obsessed with music since I can remember,” Sigfusson said naming everyone from Michael Jackson to Leonard Cohen as major influences. “The fascinating thing about music is that people have some sort of relationship with musicians just through [the songs that transcends] speaking or meeting each other. With music, most bands create a world for themselves. Songs allow you into that world.”
