Make-up artist Mandy Artusato called in from LA after a morning shift on the set of the latest Bart Layton (American Animals) feature film ~ a crime heist film called Crime 101. Her shift had started at 4am. She needed a coffee, but she’s an Icelander. She’s tough and could last another 50 minutes.
Mandy got to know of ARgENTUM through American actor Mac Brandt when she was working with him on Joker: Folie a Deux. Mandy now uses ARgENTUM products ~ a lot ~ in her film work and has talked to us separately about make-up, skincare and skin health. She has had good responses from the actors she’s used our products on.
Mandy approached the brief of curating the second CREATOR soundtrack from a feeling perspective more than anything else. Whenever she focuses on creating something, she puts together a playlist. She loved compiling this soundtrack because the CREATOR for her means everything from a person creating something or something being created or, in the grand scheme of things, the world’s creation. These tracks resonate with her because they evoke a feeling of hope.
The selection was designed to be meditative without being too repetitive. She wanted it to ‘keep going’ rather than being in a cycle to help keep thoughts flowing. The selection is predominantly instrumental, as Mandy feels that lyrics tend to mould or alter her thoughts when she listens to music with lyrics. There’s, therefore, an inherent purity to the soundtrack. Mandy loves creating soundtracks for different things, including writing novels (three on the go!) ~ the soundtracks help put her mind into the scene she is creating and what her characters are going through. So, she compiled this CREATOR soundtrack through the eyes of ‘creating’.
All the artists here hail from Iceland, where Mandy was born and raised. She’s been in the US for 24 years but goes home a lot; she has family there ~ nephews who are growing up fast and parents who are getting older. She feels nostalgia for home and misses the landscape (‘walking and hiking and getting lost up in the mountains’) but doesn’t feel she could live there again. “It’s a difficult place to be in weather-wise. People struggle but seem to be very strong together. Icelanders are very grounded, but they are also big dreamers. My homeland speaks to me for its free thought and for seeing the world from a different perspective. We are a country of 350,000 people who have struggled and got through famine and really cold winters ~ they’re really tough people looking at the globe from the top, geographically. The city of Akureyri is the northernmost city in the world. Iceland is an ethereal place in many ways, forever strange, no matter how often you go back.”
Forever Held - Jon Hopkins, Ólafur Arnalds
This first track epitomises that from English electronic composer Jon Hopkins ~ whose 7th solo album Ritual is just out, filled with music designed to connect you to the deepest part of yourself — nice synergy with ARgENTUM there.
…Untitled # 3 – Samskeyti - Sigur Rós
Sigur Rós, which translates as ‘Victory Rose’, is an Icelandic band. Samskeyti means ‘to join something together’, and I chose it to join one track to another. There’s a journey starting here. It is a very flowy track that is not repetitive. It transcends.
Þú ert jörðin - Ólafur Arnalds
The title means ‘You are the Earth’. Ólafur Arnalds is a fantastic composer. This one reminds me of getting into some deep thoughts and moving through forests and things like that, which is something I really love to do. Again, there’s the feeling of hope. The violins in this song are very sad, but that doesn’t mean it’s a sad song. It’s like the yin and the yang of everything ~ the balance of the world, the balance of everything ~ you can’t know true love until you know true sadness. Icelanders are really good about that; it’s a part of them, knowing true deep sadness and hardship ~ and the more you have overcome that, the more you can care and love even more.
Stonemilker - Björk
Björk has moved into another era. She’s always been such an interesting artist, very eclectic. I love that song she did some years ago, ‘All is Full of Love’, but I didn’t feel it quite fitted here. She’s moved into being almost like an ethereal being; even with her videos, it’s so strange. But this gives me the same feeling as ‘All is Full of Love’, but not that track and this is the best one.
Viðrar vel til loftárása - Sigur Rós
The title means ‘It’s good weather for an air attack’. I love the fact it’s so contradictory. It’s like when you’re in a situation and can’t do anything about it, but you look up into the sky and think, ‘Yeah, it’s good weather for an air attack!’ It’s positive.
Perth - amiina
This is a new artist for me. I wanted to find another Icelandic group I’d never heard of before. I was surprised I hadn’t heard of them before, as they’ve been around for a while. I wanted to include a track that was entirely new for me, and it felt like I’d heard it for many, many years, and this was exactly that.
Svefn-g-englar - Sigur Rós
The singer of this band makes up his own words. A lot of Icelanders don’t know what he’s saying. He’s created his own language ~ a kind of Elvish. The first word means sleep, and ‘englar’ means angel. But I don’t know what that ‘g’ is doing there! It’s an absolutely beautiful piece. I put this song in the middle as it feels like the dearest to my heart because I was in Iceland when it came out, and nobody had ever done anything like this. The girlfriend of one of the band members was pregnant, so they recorded sounds from her womb. Anyway, I was in a record store, and we heard this sound coming from outside, and it was an impromptu Sigur Rós concert on the roof, and this was the first song that they played ~ it was kind of like a Let it Be Beatles moment.
It’s Time For You To Stop Being A ghost - Sindri Már Sigfússon, Sin Fang
This is a collaboration. I put it here, following the above, because it’s a kind of rebirth song. The title feels so fantastic to me because ‘it’s time for you to wake up and become a human!’
Then three in the final four from Jóhann Jóhannsson, my favourite composer ~ but just to say, they are completely different tracks!
Flight from the City - Jóhann Jóhannsson, Yuki Numata Resnick, Tarn Travers, Ben Russell, Clarice Jensen
A Song for Europa - Jóhann Jóhannsson, Air Lyndhurst String Orchestra, Anthony Weeden
These two back-to-back songs have always felt to me like growing pains. A Song for Europa, Europa being the planet… I always felt like it was so ethereal, so spacy in a cosmic way, extraterrestrial ~ anything. If I want to meditate or completely shut down outside thoughts coming into my mind, these two songs literally take me away from Earth and out into Space. I love zooming out of the world and imagine floating into space. Since I’ve created this soundtrack, I’ve been using it a lot.
Dalur - Ólafur Arnalds, Brasstríó Mosfellsdals
This next song is, in contrast, super grounding; it shoots you right back down onto Planet Earth, not just Planet Earth, but back to where I used to live. This song and the brass trio are actually from my little hometown, Mosfellsdalur, and, in fact, from the valley I used to live in. We used to have a horse farm there, right at the root of the mountains, and I rode my horses right through that valley. The small Icelandic ponies are great horses, resilient, sure-footed, and very fluffy in the wintertime.
Kangaru - Jóhann Jóhannsson
In this particular piece, Jóhann did the soundtrack for the movie Arrival, which is one of my favourite films, which is about a linguist enlisted by the United States Army to discover how to communicate with the Heptapods, extraterrestrials who have arrived on Earth and immediately surrounded by the army. The general doesn’t understand what the linguist is trying to do, so to get her point across, she tells the general a story to demonstrate what communication truly is and how things can be misinterpreted or lost in translation ~ she tells him the story of kangaroo: when explorers in Australia first saw a kangaroo they asked the aborigines what they were and they said ‘kangaroo’, which the explorers thought was the name of the animal, only to discover it meant ‘I don’t know what you’re saying’. When the general walks away, her colleague, a theoretical physicist brought in by the government to collaborate with her in deciphering the language of the alien visitors, says, ‘Wow, that was an incredible story, was it true?’ and she says, ‘No, but I needed to get my point across!’ The feeling this song evokes and its place in the movie is an absolute trying to figure out how we can all understand each other and come together, listening and hearing what the other person is trying to say. Kangaru is about everybody coming together to unite.
Listen to the CREATOR Soundtrack, curated by Mandy Artusato:
