From the First Record to the Next Unknown

Left to right: Nico Muhly, Valgeir Sigurðsson, Ben Frost.

Twenty years ago today, Bedroom Community released its first record, Speaks Volumes.

I don’t think any of us imagined then that we were beginning a twenty-year story. Built on friendships forged in New York City and Melbourne, and brought together in Reykjavík, Bedroom Community grew naturally around Greenhouse Studios and the work Ben Frost, Nico Muhly and I were making together. It became a home for music that could move freely between different forms and traditions—something still unusual at the time—and for artists who wanted to be involved in one another’s work—not simply names sharing the same label.

Over time, that community grew much wider. Artists arrived with their own languages and ideas, but collaboration and curiosity remained at the centre of it: playing, producing, arranging, listening and making things possible for one another.

Twenty years inevitably leaves behind an archive—records, performances, tours, photographs and countless stories. We’ll be opening some of that up over the coming year. But I don’t want this anniversary to suggest that the story is complete, or to be only about looking back. Bedroom Community has changed shape many times, and it is still changing. The point is to connect what we have made with the music, artists and possibilities ahead.

I’m enormously grateful to everyone who has been part of Bedroom Community: the artists, collaborators, friends and team around the label, and everyone who has listened, followed, bought a record, come to a concert or shared the music with someone else.

Today feels less like closing a circle than stepping into the next unknown.

— Valgeir Sigurðsson

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

I had spent unholy amounts of time alone in a bedroom in Australia making highly questionable music when I met Valgeir in the year 2000. I think the name of the label was initially aiming at exactly that—the privacy of it—a laptop and headphones, airport departure lounge compositions. And then the improbable business of finding other people who had tuned into that same frequency and arrived at their own version of the same feeling, from entirely different directions, with different instruments, different stories. The community.

Valgeir had told me, ‘You need to meet Nico.’ ‘We are all going to start a label.’ What followed was a veritable hurricane of creativity, so much of it, and so fast, and all of it so wildly ambitious.

I learned so much. Twenty years of colliding music, of sharing and challenging, of being talked into ideas that on paper had no business working, and then watching them work anyway. Of making things that didn’t have names yet, with a community of absurdly talented people, and real, deep friendship.

God we have had so. much. fun.

— Ben Frost