Riceboy Sleeps - 'Riceboy Sleeps' (Parlophone) Released 20/07/09

Those acquainted with the superb 'Dark Was The Night' Red Hot compilation by The National will recognise the name Riceboy Sleeps from the concluding track, 'Happiness'. Riceboy Sleeps is the moniker of Jón Þór (Jónsi) Birgisson, the lead singer from Sigur Ros, along with his partner Alex Somers and long-term string collaborators Amiina. Riceboy Sleeps has emerged over the last few years from art installations and exhibitions and has morphed into the title of the duo and the album. 'Riceboy Sleeps' is a 9 track work characterised by dramatic inner landscapes and imaginative orchestral workings in a way that mirrors Sigur Ros's most euphoric (if instrumental) moments.

Jónsi's falsetto doesn't get a look in, but what does emerge is a wonderfully wrought work of neo-classical suites, fugues, and ambient musings from the camp inhabited by Jóhann Jóhannsson and Tom Middleton's Amba project. The compositions positively soar when the lungs of the Kopavogsdaetur choir get to grips with the shifting sands of orchestrations.

'Atlas Song' and 'Stokkseyri' are pure and glacial works that wash over with ethereal choral and orchestral tones leaving serotonin eddies in the mind, while the superlative 'Boy 1904' is like having a retreat at the Taj Mahal with just yourself and Jack Jones for company – spiritual, transporting, and aura cleansing it most certainly is! Meanwhile, 'Daniell In the Sea' is like a picnic with Our Lord's heavenly host's - a track moved by the warp and wept of the choir looped and shifted as a choral oceanic current is affected by a gravitational über-pull.

A bold and intrepid album, no less. 'Happiness' has the feel of a vintage assemblage as scrambled frequencies scored with emotive baroque strings – there's a stirring sense of loss coupled with an elegance to chill even the most anguished soul. Elsewhere, there's hints of digi-trickery on 'Howl', the creaky 'Sleeping Giant' and 'All The Big Trees', the latter featuring warbles and mini-sonic excerpts like trying to tune Radio Luxembourg on an old tranny, and the former with curio's of animal chirrups, cawking and grunting.

Drawn solely from acoustic instruments in Iceland, 'Riceboy Sleeps' was further tinkered with on a raw food commune in Hawaii for further nutritional support. Whilst the stuff dreamy wonders are made of, the unvarying play of tempo's make it cut a cut to size release that carries an 'acquired' tag. 'Riceboy Sleeps', nevertheless, ushers shifts of consciousness to beta rhythm plateau's, like watching the crumble and tumble of an iceberg's fissures - elegiac and unassuming, there's much to enthrall here.