Uncommon Music, Common Ground

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From the First Record to the Next Unknown
From the First Record to the Next Unknown

A room in Breiðholt. Friendships that brought Nico, Ben and Valgeir together in Reykjavík. Music that needed a place of its own. As the anniversary season begins, the founders of Bedroom Community — Nico Muhly, Valgeir Sigurðsson and Ben Frost — reflect on the label’s beginnings, first records and the music still to come.

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A Space for the Hard to Place

BEFORE THERE WERE TWENTY YEARS TO LOOK BACK ON, THERE WAS A FIRST RECORD.

Released on 10 September 2006, Nico Muhly’s Speaks Volumes was the first Bedroom Community release. Produced and mixed by Valgeir Sigurðsson, it brings strings, piano, electronics and silence into close focus — seven pieces that still reward careful listening.

Bedroom Community represents a miraculous time in my life: the music I was writing felt as if it was floating between worlds with no real landing strip. Valgeir, in his wisdom and with his voracious ears, created—in suburban Reykjavík, of all places—a label, studio, and house where my music, Ben Frost’s music, his own music, and Sam Amidon’s music could all coëxist in the same space, at the same time, with the same ethos of an individual artist’s work inside a community of like-minded (if stylistically variant) collaborators.

This label has taught me how to collaborate in the studio, work together on tour, become a creature of the studio, and I couldn’t be more proud of the wide embrace the label has. Here’s to 20 more!

— Nico Muhly

LISTEN / 2006

Speaks Volumes

The first Bedroom Community release.

Some things begin by staying close. Close to the room they were made in. Close to the questions that brought them there in the first place.

On Speaks Volumes, recording is part of the composition’s life. Close microphones bring the physical detail of playing into focus; the production gives those details room to be heard.

Twenty years later, you can still begin with the smallest sound.