-after listening to this song and watching the video i can’t help but praise how beautiful it all is. 

Sigur Rós - Fjögur píanó

(an interview with the Director)

“Trying to explain is as impossible as holding onto to water,” says Alma Har’el of her experience directing Icelandic band Sigur Ros’ latest video for “Fjogur Piano,” off the album Valtari.

It’s “erotic, trippy, hypnotic, painful and misunderstood,” says Har’el. “Like certain relationships we have with ourselves or with people and things.”

C: How did the music help you get to the concept?

AH: …But then I got this image in my mind of two people, locked in a room surrounded by dead butterflies. I find dead butterflies to be these beautiful creatures that live very short lives. It takes so long for them to become the butterflies, and then they only live for a few days or hours.

Every day, they keep waking up. She wakes up before him and notices that things are not going the way they should. And every time, she tries to make him understand. There’s a lot of pain, a lot of frustration.

C: So what are the lollipops?

AH: The lollipops are the drugs. They have scorpions inside them, this idea of something poisonous that is wrapped in sugar. It’s also an animal that is very passionate, the female cuts off the male’s heads while they have intercourse. They are passion, they are cruelty, wrapped up in sugar.

C: And that’s a metaphor for the relationship?

AH: Yes. When you’re in a relationship like that, you keep trying to bring back the beautiful moments you had. You keep revisiting them, trying to bring them back, but you cannot.

When you have passionate love in your love but it doesn’t work practically, you keep reminding each other of both the good and bad things. That’s what Shia and Denna are doing to each other.

C: What does Denna say when she shows him the butterfly?

AH: That is better left not verbalized into actual words. We want everything to be in words, but if you look at her face, you’ll feel her anger, her despair, her frustration and her sense of crisis. She’s showing him the butterfly that he wakes up with everyday. It’s the same butterfly, which means it’s the same thing. They have been there before. Every time they’re in that room, it feels like the time they were there before.