To be honest, I don't particularly see myself as an Icelandic artist. I'm a European artist.
I'm a huge fan of Philip K. Dick.
I don't want to make light of the importance of my musical upbringing, as you cannot avoid being influenced by the area you grow up, but I will say that Reykjavik's geography is very different from, say, New York, Paris, or Copenhagen. There's big skies. The buildings are low. The landscape is spread out.
I was completely fascinated by the studio process and layering sounds and creating soundscapes out of layering massive squalls of sound.
There's very little synthesized sound in the 'Arrival' score. There are a couple of synthesized beats in there, but 99 percent of the sounds in there are acoustic in origin and either played or sung by a musician or a singer and recorded in a room.
I think that the essence of being an artist is to break rules. You have to learn rules, and you have to break them, because if you make art only by the rules, then you make very boring art.
I think there's very little interesting in art that is not transgressive in some way. And I don't think that's a very revolutionary thing to say.
I am not very extreme in my life. But I'm very attracted to art that works with extremes and works with limits, that transgresses limits and transcends limits and crosses borders and has a certain boldness.
The more effort you put into something, the more you get out of it.