So I went to see Sigur Ros at the Chicago Theater last night.

The opening group was actually the string quartet part of the band, seperately called Amina. They were four girls from Iceland who use everything from a thumb piano (which I had a little bit of experience with myself in high school) to wineglasses to what looked like a hot Powerbook (it churned out phat beats, yo). One of the girls was a maniac on the saw. They didn’t get much love from the lights or sound people, but I liked the few songs they did a lot. Very inventive– it was actually neater to watch then I think it might be to listen to.

After they finished, Sigur Ros came on with what ended up being a very multimedia show. They started with a scrim in front of the stage, and lights slowly casting their shadows in different colors on it. At the end of the first song, the scrim raised, and what followed was a cascade of sound that didn’t stop once the whole night. Their music is original. It’s varied, and rhythmic, but in a different way than you usually think of rhythmic. It’s tribal, but in an Icelandic sort of way.

In fact, it’s very dark, and melancholy. Songs start with a tone or two, sustained, and then build, and grow, until the lead singer is repeating a single phrase in Icelandic over and over while the keyboardist, bassist, quartet, and drummer bang away in their own places in the background. It’s strange, because even with all that going on, it’s all very solitary. Sitting in the crowd (and we were sitting, strange for a rock show), things melt away quite a bit. It’s just you with this sound they’re pouring out, and the sounds are almost so unfamiliar and foreign that you become alone, with yourself, trying to decipher what’s coming at you.

Of all things, I thought of Hurricane Rita. During one of the songs by Amina, I first thought of them as rain. Little plinkets of sound drop one by one, and then start melding and falling together, until you’re in a real downpour of sound. And Sigur Ros was even more torrential– great sheets of tune and melody crashed across that stage the whole time. And I thought of Hurricane Rita, which is right now, as I write, currently whirling away out there in the Gulf. Have you seen that thing? It’s practically the size of the entire Gulf. It’s sucking up water, pouring it back out, twisting waves and spilling around. I thought of what it would be like to be there, alone, in Rita, drenched in rain and pushed by the wind, in the middle of an undeniable force, as I listened to Sigur Ros.

There’s a thing I do while driving called Stealth Mode. I’d like to think I created it, but I’m not entirely sure where I got it from. It’s where you’re driving on a back road all alone at night, with no lights around, and you really quickly reach down and turn off your cars’ lights. Yes, it’s dangerous, but what you get out of it is a feeling of being alone, in the middle of nowhere, and speeding along a path that you can’t see anymore. You’re in the middle of something you can’t control. Something really powerful.

That’s what I think it would be like to be in the middle of Hurricane Rita right now. Right in the midst of one of the most powerful forces on the planet, constantly churning and feeding on itself and swelling up to massive size. And it’s dangerous, because you know that come Saturday, all that force is going to pound into the coast, and tear up as many lives as it can.

I thought of all this because Sigur Ros is just like that. It was unleashed, unwielded, powerful music. It was huge, and misunderstood, and out of control. And I think that its size, and the fact that it was out of control, just like the gigantic storm that’s about to crush the lower half of our country again– I think that it’s those things that made it so beautiful.