Bedroom Community

Words by Bartek Wilk Looking through Bedroom Community’s catalogue, you will simply find 30 releases. The first from the label was Nico Muhly’s Speaks Volumes, released on 25th November 2006. And the latest one is from Ben Frost — The Centre Cannot Hold (29th September 2017). But there is much more to the story of this world-renowned collective. The beginning We have to go back to 1997 to Breiðholt (literally ‘wide hill’) in the suburbs of Reykjavík, Iceland. Since the 1970s, Breiðholt has been a community full of youngsters, working class people and non-Icelandic immigrants. That’s the place where Valgeir Sigurðsson started Greenhouse Studios. And that is where it all began… During the next few years, Greenhouse Studios was where Valgeir began recording and collaborating with other great artists from different parts of the globe, like American composer Nico Muhly. They met in the New York studio where both were working on different projects — Sigurðsson with Björk on her album Medúlla and Muhly working with Philip Glass. Valgeir offered to help record Nico’s album and invited him to Iceland. They later said their first collaboration was a kind of informal barter for them. Nico had written and finished all of his pieces but he needed to make a high-quality record, and Valgeir had tons of drafts that needed to be finished. He wanted to emerge from being only a collaborator. At the same time around 2005, Ben Frost, a native Australian, moved to Iceland for good. Sigurðsson met him