Quentin Ertel makes the announcement as he faces the audience. We’re in the deepest chamber of Ballard’s Shibuya Hi-Fi, and listening to music is the entire point of the room. Just outside its ligneous quarters, a busy bar thrums with a Friday night’s worth of patrons, but not an ounce of the outside noise seeps into our ears. We’re completely sealed in, our shoes in disorganized piles near the door after having removed them as a requirement for entry. Aside from a few unlucky standing souls, we’re curled up on couches and chairs upholstered in dusty reds, dark blues, and beiges. The sharp transition from ambient revelry to complete silence injects a sacredness into the space that leads us to hush our voices instinctually. 

Next to Ertel, a skinny man in a red velvet blazer and two long strawberry-blonde braids interjects. “Don’t you want to go over what this room is?” he asks, his English graced with just a hint of a native Icelandic accent. 

Later he jokes that he was just nervous, trying to buy time before his hour-long presentation on Iceland’s young musical history, but I was grateful for the question as it saved me the effort of asking it myself. Ertel obliges, immediately launching into a breakdown of the room that he, co-owner Brain Rauschenberg, and musical director DJ Supreme La Rock, designed to be the centerpiece of Shibuya Hi-Fi. 

He begins with the sound equipment. In the corners rest a chunky pair of Klipschorns, built by Paul Klipsch himself nearly fifty years ago; their cabinets, husky boxes of stained wood, partially blend with the wooden slats on the walls like pieces of a pop-up book. Standing beside them is a pair of ATC SCM50 loudspeakers, a long standing staple in the world’s most famous recording studios, from Abbey Road in London to Electric Ladyland in New York City. Behind Ertel, on a short varnished cabinet housing a selection of LPs, is a Luxman L-505uXII amplifier (hand assembled in Japan) with 100 watts per channel; the turntable beside it is a Technics 1200G outfitted with a Nagaoka MP200 cartridge, its nude diamond stylus providing particularly silky mid frequencies. The jargon and stats make my head spin. I’m not an audiophile, and I’m aware of how far a confident stance can go in these realms of refinement. It only takes a cursory search, however, to prove that the equipment is genuinely impressive (and inordinately expensive). 

Details on the art and furnishings follow, starting from the ground up. A gorgeous rug, patterned like a tray of chevron licorice Allsorts, covers most of the floor. The exquisite tufts of the rug, constructed by five Afghan artisans over a period of eight months, yield only slightly to our sock-covered feet. Towering behind Ertel, an enormous painting by local abstract artist Christy Hopkins presents a striking contrast to the plaintive, parallel cedar slats surrounding it. Both Ertel and Rauschenberg found Hopkins’ signature, a clash of orderly compartments and chaotic colors, a perfect fit for the space - this piece in particular, influenced by Miles Davis’ “Flamenco Sketches,” layers disruptive streaks of black over bright yellows and cool pastels (perhaps it’s a coincidence that the painting is kind of blue).

Those colors deepen under the soft lighting of the room’s unique chandeliers. According to Ertal, they’re part of Seattle music history. Danish lightning manufacturer Louis Poulsen designed only ten of them to hang over Benaroya Hall’s Founders Lounge; that means the two hanging above us are the only ones of their kind currently lit in the world. “For some insane reason, they got rid of all ten,” says Ertel. “And for some equally insane reason, we bought all ten.” 

The intention of these inclusions is to allow a ceremonial gravitas into an experience that’s been rendered quotidian in the streaming era, when listeners don’t (or perhaps cannot) conceive of listening to music as an activity. Most of us interface with music as either a passive accompaniment to daily life or an auxiliary addition to it, and songs are as accessible as they are disposable. Here, virtue hides in the inaccessible: besides the ritualistic entry process and the presence of tens of thousands of dollars worth of audio equipment, there’s a $20 admission fee - two-thirds the cost of owning the vinyl itself - and a limited number of spaces available per session. These elements present the act of listening as ceremonial (and presumably worth such a fee), and the entrant is led to treat it as such. 

It helps their case that those scheduled sessions are usually for modern classics in the Western canon: records that many devoted listeners already treat as special, and also tend to have been hailed as triumphs of audio engineering upon their release. The alien landscapes of Radiohead’s Kid A, the revolutionary Black soul of D’Angelo’s Voodoo, and the dense cerebral atmosphere of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon have all been featured in the space. While any records would benefit from this kind of technology, the opportunity to listen to these specific works in crystal-clear fidelity, without shelling out a fortune for state-of-the-art gear, is an enticing proposition. But though the inspiration for the space comes directly from Japan, its functional simplicity, stark hues, and visual similarity to a sauna makes it an ideal classroom for an education on a certain sect of Scandinavian culture. Today we’ve specifically gathered here to learn about the pop canon of Iceland, a Western country unfamiliar to most Americans. 

Our teacher for the night is Sveinbjörn Thorarensen, aka Hermigervill, the man with the fiery braids standing next to Ertel. For the last two decades, Thorarensen has worked as a recording artist and DJ who specializes in atmospheric sample-based trip-hop. His first two records, 2002’s Lausnin and 2005’s Sleepwork, are notable as much for their status as relics of the “plunderphonics” EDM movement as they are for the distinct pieces he plunders. Now and then, Thorarensen is a devoted scholar of Icelandic music, and both his DJ sets and his recorded releases are strictly composed of recordings from his home country. 

He’s certainly the most knowledgeable in the room on the subject, a fact he demonstrates as he lays Hljömar’s second record on the turntable and lets the needle descend. As it decodes the grooves in the wax, the room fills with the sunlit harmonies and airtight melodies of the famed quintet. Thorarensen’s voice, genial and deep, rises over the music as he instructs us of Hljömar’s foundational power. “These guys were always called the Icelandic Beatles,” he says, and it’s easy to hear why - the smooth edges and satiny warmth of Gunnar Þórðarson’s voice on “Ástarsæla” bears more than a little resemblance to that of Paul McCartney’s. 

He continues, leading us through the context of cuts from Þorir Baldurrson’s self-titled record and Magnús Eiríksson’s Smámyndir. He delivers this torrent of information with concision and wit. “Hermigervill,” in English, loosely translates to “artificial intelligence,” and he certainly comes across as an endless repository of facts about the topic. Much of Iceland’s early music, he explains, comes not from Reykjavík but from the coastal city of Keflavík, where the country’s main airport resides. The airport, which has also doubled as a U.S. army base since the 1940s, allowed American radio to more easily infiltrate the city’s airwaves and influence its young musicians - hence the apparent Beatles and Motown comparisons on Hjölmar II. (The band did try to make it in America as Thor’s Hammer, but were met with scant success.) 

As we familiarize ourselves with the names in Thorarensen’s saga, it becomes apparent how much of Iceland’s musical bedrock was constructed by a mere handful of individuals. Then as now, the country’s music scene is so tight-knit as to be incestuous. Hljömar’s bassist Rúnar Júlíusson, for instance, was best friends with Baldurrson, a man not only responsible for some of Iceland’s most beloved tunes but who was also the programmer for the motorik chug of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love.” The two would end up recording together in Giorgio Moroder’s studio with Baldurrson’s wife, who was Júlíusson’s sister. Hljömar’s Þórðarson, meanwhile, would build Iceland’s first significant recording studio Hljóðriti, where future Icelandic superstar Björk Guðmundsdóttir first laid her voice to tape as an eleven-year-old. The studio was also where Mezzoforte’s Björn Thorarensen recorded one of the most recognizable synth lines in Iceland’s musical history. “I hate that my father wrote it,” Sveïnbjörn cracks. 

The night advances. It’s incredible to hear such old records rendered so clearly. Those mids are, indeed, particularly silky. The LP sleeves are passed around the audience, and as they approach my seat I attempt to replicate the foreign words, sounding out the accents. I glean nothing, but nothing’s necessary for me to glean. The spirit of the music suffices: the gleeful greed of a snare’s ghost notes, the collaborative wonder of human voices stacked in harmony, brash horns replicating Shady Owens’ euphoric declaration as the wooden walls around us try their hardest to contain her epiphany. 

“Ég elska alla!” 

The phrase, we are later told, means “I love everything.”