YouTube Lets Sigur Ròs Be Weird All Over Its Front Page For 24 Hours

If you’ve been on YouTube today, you may have noticed that the front page is curiously devoid of videos like “Todd’s Oscars rant” and “Monkey eats cheese.” Instead, Iceland’s second-most-famous weirdo musicians, Sigur Ròs, have taken over the site for the day, and anyone can watch their tour documentary Heima in its entirety (for free!). They’ve also selected ten fan-made videos submitted to the Minn Heima contest to be featured on the front page. Most of the videos use leftover footage from Heima, but at least one out of ten Sigur Ròs fans is going to be artsy enough to dabble in stop-motion animation. Let’s review a few of the more notable entires.

This one definitely makes the best use of the preexisting footage, adding animation to most of the images and screwing around with the colors. The iridescent sheep standing amid a swarm of fireflies provide a particularly striking image. Someone’s an art student! Luckily stop-motion couldn’t be a more perfect fit for Sigur Ròs’ jerky, yet peculiarly fluid sound. I think this one might be my favorite. Not only is the stop-motion well done and very appropriate for for the song, a few of the Heima clips in there have been put through the experimental cycle on an editing program and come out all backwards and color-confused. It’s out-there without being pretentious, much like Sigur Ròs (though I assume some would beg to differ on that one). This video, like the worst of Sigur Ròs, is just plain boring. The concept appears to be that the footage is some sort of old photograph, as it’s drenched in sepia tones and framed to look like a very old photo. It just comes off looking like a page of the most oblique scrapbook in the world. But on the plus side, at the very end the horses run backwards just like in Enigma’s “Return to Innocence” video.

The rest of the videos, which are up on YouTube’s front page, tread along similar lines: lots of Icelandic landscapes altered with experimental editing and varying levels of pretentiousness. But despite the clips’ (somewhat inevitable) artsy earnestness, it’s comforting to know that YouTube will cater to a slightly higher-brow sensibility every once in a while; with any luck the site will make this 24-hour-takeover concept a regular feature. My only complaint is that this guy didn’t submit.

YouTube [Official site]