gamli elskhuginn sem aldrei sagðist elska þig og mun aldrei segja það

Not to give Sigurrós too much credit, but you finally felt something while hearing their music. It helped that you were outdoors on a strangely warm, late summer night, Hallgrímskirkja a dagger in the lace agate sky, the sun neither neither up nor quite disappeared, the air sharp with green grass trampled underfoot by the placid wool-clad herd. The murmur could have been part of the composition. Hljóð. Hljótt. Hljóð.

It feels like a cool hand closing around your descending aorta, that great conduit of blood. It doesn't stop the flow entirely, but it you realize that it could, and it is as if you found yourself standing at the edge of an abyss, newly aware that you could, someday, fall.

You've felt it before. You felt it sidle by years ago at another concert in Oslo, in a crowd with X-rays of people in motion projected on a giant screen. Then it was just a tug at that unsung, bowed muscle that works your lungs. It was a foretaste, an intimation, long before you ever set foot here, in this place.

You've felt it at a choral mass for the dead (even before anyone had died), and upon seeing shocking white peaks over a winter-bound city, and upon seeing birds rise into the air. You've felt it here, every time, sooner or later, and with some regularity on such clear, mild, late-summer evenings.