here's every impression that occurs to me now before i go to sleep opening and closing white sheet silhouettes bass player and jonssi's silhouettes superimposed first guy iota good voice diesel like charming, tough job, second band string section lots of percussion koto like plucky string instruments that sometimes were bent to make twangy uneasy sounds fingers rubbing wet glasses to hum, some strings, vibrophone, sequenced ibook, fairy dresses, saw with astonishing virtuosity but hard to use live because the bowing/hitting with a mallet is far louder than the actual resonating saw blade first song massive impact hadn't heard it before, real rocking stuff with gloss and polish and perfection but substance i thought i was going to pass out head spin and tight chest feelings, got really nervous, didn't want to miss it, drummer front stage right, then bass player then jonssi then bank of manual-y instruments behind which keyboard player/guitarist hid, with string girls up the back last song (encore) was banging again with the curtain and overwhelming there were visuals but not remarkable except during a really pretty tinkly song which ended with violin trills and the imagery was black with white 70's style sparkles coming off water or something gradually falling down the screen at a low frame rate and another good bit of imagery was all black and darting white shapes that gradually multipled and curved as they flew and you eventually realised it was moths everywhere and the contrast increased over five minutes until you could see a light patch of sky or an illuminated tree (hard to tell) behind the moths and it just looked like something from summer when you were a kid and the song with the violin trills at the end reminds me that every time they played a song that trailed off into silence i found myself aching for the crowd to keep the fuck shut up at the end of the track so that we all could just bathe in it, but their enthusiasm got the better and clapping started like a noise gate as soon as volume dropped below 0.5% or something which was very frustrating, but later on sigur ros made my dreams come true because in the middle of a song they paused (as you do) but the pause was utterly silent and went on... and on... and on... for about 10 seconds (which i bet is a long time when you're standing in a spotlight in front of 5000 utterly silent people) and i thought "fuck me, they know _EVERYTHING_" and talking to carly the thing about them is that you get subcurrent feelings of bad things happening or sad feelings but the main theme is "it's all gonna be okay" or as carly put it "it's okay, because how can it be all bad when there are such beautiful things in the world" which i think pretty much sums up how i didn't yet know i thought of it and there were more tracks than i expected where the keyboardist played guitar and he was quite good and there was a track i hadn't heard with quite intricate fast guitar and piano work by him which caused a fat ol groove to be got on by the overall band and i want to find a recording of that and jonssi didn't play hardly any regular style fingerpicking/plectrum guitar, just bowing mostly and he blew out a bow completely while playing a fun song in which the bass player rhythmically banged his strings using what looked to me like a lummy stick like they taught us music with in prep except he was very precise and very rapid and consistent, and it formed the basis for this driving driving song where in the end the strings were all doing this pizzicato very short high riff which ultimately turned into a bowed version of same with a rapid frenzy note to fill the gaps between run-throughs of the riff and jonssi was singing major scale very simple lines and it just drove and drove and drove and i think that was second last song before the encore and i watched the drummer tapping a pad of some kind at the start of repetitions of a progression which i guess was coordinating some samples or something and the lighting was clever and at the very end they turned on a fat-ass burnt dull orange spot pointing out from the centre of thes tage into the audience while a muffled sample played and they came out and bowed twice and the various guys walked on and off stage many times and whenever jonssi did and walked past the drum kit you could hear his footsteps coming through on the bass drum mic and he looked frustrated a few times as if he couldn't hit notes he wanted when singing quietly and did i mention that there just aren't any other singers like him? and also he's an incredible singer and by the way i like his voice a lot? and he sang through his guitar for about 30 seconds but with no effects just his voice and it was almost identical to normal singing through a microphone and when the first band played they had a trestle table with all their percussion and it had a frilly lacy white table cloth and they were all wearing fairy-type dresses and the keyboardist's voice is actually extremely good too when he was harmonising in the encore, he just stood up there and hit those notes bang on and was old faithful to jonssi's high low-throated tidal wave and hamer hall's sound is pretty fucking good and that's all i can think of for now.