For reasons unknown, I often drift away from music I love.

I suppose because I become attached to another musician, or something else, but recently I drifted back to an early album by a transcendental collection of musicians called Sigur Rós. The album is called “Von,” the group’s earliest release only recently re-discovered due to the initial limited release on its local Icelandic label. Released in 1997, the album is not by any means as grand as say “Ágætis byrjun” and not as complex; however, “Von” conveys the precious minimalist sound for which Sigur Rós is known.

For anyone who has been to Iceland or has at the very least seen pictures, it is easy to understand the vast space in the landscape. With the population sporadically placed, the landscape is the most evident aspect to the visitor’s eye. It literally grabs your chest and pulls at your soul, giving you a clear reality of how gracious the world can be. It’s clear where Sigur Rós found its inspiration. In “Von,” the calm that the landscape fills in you, as well as the wonder, is conveyed perfectly in the music of the album, and rightly, “Von” means “hope” in Icelandic. When listening to this album, it’s as if the landscapes creep into your conscious, and if you close your eyes, you can imagine perfectly what it was they were looking at when this was written. That is the case for all of their music.

It is almost as if the visual inspiration travels with this band. I was driving through the back country of Iowa during a storm and even the vast empty space seemed awe inspiring. The music carries with it a sense of wonder, as though you can feel exactly what the band felt looking out over the vast landscape of its home country.

The only way I can describe the feeling I get when I hear this music is it is like heroin. It is an incredible calm that overcomes you and you drift off to wherever the band wants you. They manage to combine the most beautiful orchestrations and utter simplicity that listening to this band is an experience on its own.

The song “Olsen Olsen” off “Ágætis byrjun” is a perfect example. The song pulls your heart out for the eight wondrous minutes, beginning and ending in the simplest beauty. Simple one- to three-instrument arrangements leading into an explosion that sends chills down every inch of your skin, then ends in the shuffling sounds of undefined conversations and children laughing. It is as if you are listening to someone’s life, and not a music record. It becomes a story in the mind of the listener, and it is up to the listener to create that story for themselves.

Sigur Rós is very much about the emotional communication with the listener. They are not trying to give some concrete point of view, what the music does is spark some feeling inside you and pulls out the curious child we all were that was in absolute awe of the everything around us.

I do believe that the beauty of the music of Sigur Rós has much to do with the landscape of Iceland. The vastness and striking orchestrations match the overwhelming nature of the Icelandic countryside, yet the simple absence of human intervention in the land produces in the music points of stunning naivety that come together perfectly.

Each album is an emotional story. Sigur Rós is known for singing in both Icelandic and in English, but also in what they call Vonlenska, in English translating to “Hopelandic.” The name was inspiring by the song “Von” off its first album of the same name. Vonlenska are the unintelligible lyrics sung by singer Jonsi, meant to convey the specific emotions of the songs, not words.

Music is emotional communication, and Sigur Rós takes the wonder of its homeland and translates that into grand and simple orchestrations that match the wonder evoked by the vastness of Iceland. In fact, the entire album of “()” is sung is Vonlenska, and it one of the group’s most widely loved creations.

To understand the beauty of what Sigur Rós does in its music, I urge you to watch the documentary “Heima,” which means “at home.” The documentary follows that band all over Iceland performing free unannounced concerts for the Icelandic people in unconventional places, many of them outside against the backdrop of the different landscapes. In this documentary, you will find Sigur Rós as it was meant to be seen, and see exactly from where the music manifested. It’s a very powerful creation that will no doubt move something in you that little else can.