Jónsi & Alex

Riceboy Sleeps

Jónsi is Jón Þór Birgisson, born April 23, 1975, the singer of Sigur Rós; Alex Somers, born March 7, 1984 in Baltimore, is an American visual artist and musician who studied at Berklee and the Icelandic Academy of the Arts and later ran a studio in downtown Reykjavík. They began working together around 2003 under the name Riceboy Sleeps, Somers being the Riceboy, a nickname from a period when he lived mostly on rice. Their first public work was a picture book, Riceboy Sleeps, in 1,000 hand-numbered copies on November 24, 2006. Exhibitions followed in Arkansas in 2007 and at the Melbourne International Arts Festival in October 2007.

The album Riceboy Sleeps came out on July 20, 2009 on Parlophone and EMI, produced by the pair. Somers told KEXP it was made on and off for about five years at home, and that they did not intend to make a record; Jónsi told It's A Trap they recorded it only for themselves. It was recorded in their Reykjavík flat with acoustic instruments, a string quartet, Amiina and the Kópavogsdætur Choir, and mixed in February 2009 in a hut in the Hawaiian jungle on solar power, with no electricity and no walls in Jónsi's words. It reached 66 in the UK and 1 on Billboard's new age albums chart. Metacritic scores it 73; PopMatters's reviewer gave 8 out of 10 and the Observer's Caspar Llewellyn Smith called it an ambient record in the best traditions of Brian Eno or Harold Budd, while Pitchfork gave 5.3 and NME 2 out of 10.

Later work includes the score for the first series of the television drama Manhattan (2014), a soundtrack for a Western Australia tourism campaign in 2013, and Lost & Found, released on October 11, 2019 on Krúnk as a sibling album to Riceboy Sleeps, reusing its samples. They toured the full album for its 10th anniversary in the autumn of 2019 with the Wordless Music Orchestra and Choir, from Seattle on October 11 to Brooklyn on October 31, and continue to collaborate. Somers has since scored Captain Fantastic, We Bought a Zoo, Honey Boy and Miss Americana and co-produced Sigur Rós's Valtari and Kveikur.