Alex Somers Tells Us What He's Learned About Music – And Life – From His Partner Jonsi

While most couples keep digital photo albums in order to look back on the early stages of their relationship, Maryland-raised film composer Alex Somers and his partner, Sigur Ros frontman Jonsi, have encapsulated the beginnings of their relationship in a record: the 2009 instrumental acoustic album Riceboy Sleeps.

“As soon as we first met, we were making music together,” explains Somers over the phone. He remembers strolling past a piano store with Jonsi after meeting each other. “There was a horn outside playing piano music.” The next day they returned with a field recorder, capturing the ambient noise in the street that meshed with the sounds of the horn. This moment became the foundation for the gently meditative tracks Happiness and All The Big Trees. 

“We’d go home and listen to these recordings and slow them down a lot – like way, way, way a lot – until they just sounded like noise. Then we built songs over the top of them," Somers says. The process of writing Riceboy Sleeps was something that felt sweet and easy. “We didn’t decide to make an album; we didn’t know we were making an album.”

The title reflects a period that would feel familiar for many musicians and artists. “It’s kind of ridiculous,” explains Somers. “It was at a time where I was like, really poor, and eating not very much. I’d often go to the grocery store and just buy these huge bags of rice. Like, as big as I could carry. And then I’d walk home like some kind of weird peasant. I probably didn’t have very much nutrition in my diet so I was sleeping quite a bit – so, it’s just a joke.”

Riceboy Sleeps was largely written in their kitchen and living room, and was then mixed in a raw food commune in Hawaii. “It’s like a time capsule,” he explains. Somers met Jonsi while Sigur Ros were touring in Boston, and he was studying at the Berklee College Of Music.

“Everyone there [was] like, ‘Oh, I want to do music, but I’ll never be able to do music.’ It’s like built into the experience of being a musician. Society says that’s unrealistic. You can’t make music and live a normal life. But there are actually a lot of people that do. And it’s just totally realistic. You just, like, do what you fucking want to do.”

It's one of the biggest lessons Somers has learnt from Jonsi. “He only wants to do what matters in life. He just doesn’t want to waste any of his time on things that are shallow or meaningless, whereas I can totally get bogged down by like, normal life, boring stuff. But he just doesn’t. It was really radical for me to meet him at such a young age – because he’s nine years older than me – and see how he lives. Like, you should just do what you want to do kind of all the time.”

Asked why they decided to make the album completely acoustic, Somers replies, “I very much work in a way that electronic musician works, that’s how I build music. But my palette is acoustic, you know? We like acoustic instruments because there’s more chance for error, there’s more fragility... Sometimes that leads to interesting patterns.”

Somers is frank and direct, but his voice is grounded in gentleness. He has reverent curiosity for sound, how it functions and how it reflects his identity. “[I can] be a bit of a control freak, and, like, get obsessed with making everything perfect. Like, I definitely struggle with that and I think recording real people playing real instruments with microphones, that’s just imperfect,” he explains. 

Somers has since accomplished a lot throughout his career: he composed the ephemeral instrumental soundtrack for Black Mirror’s Hang The DJ episode, scored the soundtrack for the 2016 film Captain Fantastic, and produces records out of his theatre-turned-studio in Reykjavík. 

But, he feels that over the past ten years sustaining a career in music has become more challenging. To survive, he says, “we need to get more weird, get more freaky, whatever that means. It doesn’t mean your music has to sound weird or freaky, but if you’re being true to yourself and finding that inner voice, that’s really valuable. And it’s lifelong, it’s not something you find overnight”.