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When I moved into my apartment, I inherited the previous owner’s leftover futon and threw a tapestry over it. But at thirty-eight years of age, I felt I was beyond tapestries and futons. I wanted a new couch. I decided that the only way to get one would be to unload the grubby futon. Because my boyfriend and I were spending our weekends writing and drawing together, I wanted to make this as efficient as it could be. Rather than selling the thing, I posted a sign in my building one Saturday morning. Some neighbors took it away for free; and I was grinning all the while, thinking how time with my boyfriend was worth a lot more than the fifty bucks I might’ve gotten for that futon.

He broke up with me later that night. I was trembling so hard I could barely get the key into the lock when I returned home at 2:00 a.m. Once inside, I sank to the floor to sob amid the dust bunnies. A week later, I dragged in an uncomfortable rattan settee that I found on the street; a week after that, I dragged the settee back to the street and made a $350 purchase at Upholstery World. At least it was a foam loveseat—a supposed step up from a futon. On the other hand, its cheap black fabric was a magnet for lint and crumbs—so much so that my fastidious architect friend Rafael refused to sit on it. But what really motivated me to buy a new couch was a romantic interlude in which I and another party leaned into a kiss that would have been so much better had I not slid off the loveseat and onto the floor.

I went to make the rounds at Crate and Barrel, which allowed me the pleasure of turning my nose up at all manner of contemporary sofas. Then I turned a corner into the very last showroom and my life changed, quite suddenly. I beheld the Petrie.

The Petrie is named, of course, for Laura and Rob Petrie, the fictional early 1960s “It” couple of The Dick Van Dyke Show. While everything else was gooey with thick, brick-shaped cushions, this was a firm, tailored couch—a long, white ledge with mid-century-style tapered legs. Those of us who came of age in the 1980s, with its recycled preppy tastes, respond well to such constructed forms. College housing departments fled the scene of college dorms and lounges during the sexual revolution of the late 1960s through the seventies, and only ventured back during the era that saw the return of Lanz nightgowns and ties at cocktail hour. While they planned massive renovations, there were old iron-framed beds, World War II-style blackout shades, and mid-century chairs, couches, and tables that lingered for a few twilight years, which were our years. Because of that, I had a compelling connection to this era’s style: In college we’d come back from class in our boxy oxfords, flats, and cropped tapered pants, light up ciggies, and flop down on a version of the Petrie. This sofa embodied my definition of beauty and possessed every creature comfort I’d ever known. It was perfect love, at last.

I forwarded a web link to my friends and took people back to Crate and Barrel to visit the Petrie. My friend Carla indulged me by lounging on the Petrie in the showroom and gabbing as if we were in my apartment. I prolonged my visits with less-intrepid companions by showing them color swatches and mulling over Fern versus Hydra. I had discussions with two salespeople, talked delivery. And then I started avoiding salespeople, who pretended not to see me, either.

I never really broke up with the Petrie. My visits to the showroom and to the website just trailed off. Once I had resolved to live within the boundaries of my take-home pay, I realized the Petrie didn’t fit within the scale of my economy. I had started saving to buy my own home; and after meeting with a mortgage broker, I realized how drastically a $1,500 couch (two thousand dollars with taxes and delivery) would affect my situation. So I let it go. Naturally, there was no point in shopping for a less-expensive couch: As with romance, choosing a second-best only yields sorrow. My love, however, will be remembered: I told my friend Thomas that I was writing an elegy to the Petrie and he said, “You mean the one you took me to visit? Do you think that maybe someday you two … ” I closed my eyes, shook my head no, and he sighed wistfully for both of us. —Kirsten Major

Tornadoes don’t have names, they have dates and times. The inky spiral that drops from the sky is memorialized according to the moment it touches down and stays, cuts the power, and skitters any which way it pleases across a field or farm or town.

St. Peter’s tornado struck at 5:20 p.m. on March 29, 1998. Before that day, this place was a stately, tree-lined town on the Minnesota River, home to Gustavus Adolphus College and more than forty buildings listed on the National Register of Historic Sites.

The twister destroyed some five hundred homes and buildings; it damaged 1,700 more. Trees that shaded the streets and squares of Gustavus were uprooted, leaving the school’s blond-brick buildings suddenly exposed on the hill above town. On Minnesota Avenue, St. Peter’s main thoroughfare, the century-old courthouse lost its soaring tower. Two people died in the storm, a six-year-old boy and an eighty-five-year-old man.

The Eugene St. Julien Cox House was damaged, but has since been repaired. Cox, St. Peter’s first mayor, was said to be “affable, genial, and always daintily dressed.” From June through August, visitors can tour his 1871 home, a neo-Gothic Italianate with a tower and carved eaves. It’s a fancy, gift-wrapped package that stands out among the suburban-style homes and spindly trees that went up after the storm. St. Peter’s curious mix of architecture—Summit Avenue meets Woodbury meets early, pre-condo Stillwater—causes time and geography to shift from corner to corner.

One landmark that went unharmed was the Drugstore Pharmacy Museum. Located inside Soderlund Village Drug on South Third Street, the museum offers a look at the history of corner drugstores. Before pharmaceutical companies began manufacturing drugs, local pharmacists made them from scratch. Extracts like sage or belladonna were compounded with chemicals into tablets or capsules. The museum displays Victorian and Art Deco-style glass globes containing rich-colored liquids that once identified individual pharmacies. A druggist’s ability to mix his own color combinations demonstrated his competence. Glass cabinets display mortars and pestles, dozens of blue and beer-colored apothecary bottles, and some quackery—an earthenware jug holds Radam’s “Microbe Killer No. 1,” patented in 1886, the ingredients of which included wine and pink dye.

Today, Soderlund remains a working pharmacy with old-time amenities: Visitors can sit on red stools at the ornate 1920s-era marble-topped soda fountain and drink root beer, compliments of the drugstore.

A block from the river is Mike’s Stuff, an antique shop with a pleasant jumble of dishes, milk bottles, embroidered tea towels and aprons, and the adjoining St. Peter Woolen Mill. Bright skeins of wool are shelved around the room, a backdrop to women examining pattern books. Usually, an orange tabby naps in a chair near the cash register. Pinned to the bulletin board are notices for knitting and quilt-making classes. There are also some absorbing color photos that document St. Peter, old and new, before and after. One shot is of the woolen mill newly smashed by the tornado, its roof collapsed. Another shows the mill now, fully restored. —Julie Hessler

"It’s the only high-fashion-slash-golf-school on the planet,” said local clothing designer Joy Teiken, standing in the doorway of the Como Avenue warehouse she shares with her husband, Craig, a professional golf instructor. Originally built in the early 1900s to manufacture tractors and other farm equipment, the front space retains a utilitarian air, despite the putting green and some black-and-white portraits of pro golfers.

But behind door number two exists Teiken’s ultra-feminine wonderland. Mannequins wear strappy floral sundresses and hats with silk boutonnières. Bolts of elaborate fabric burst from a wire rack or are otherwise scattered about the room. Colorful handbags dangle from exposed nails and random pegs, as if they were Chinese lanterns. A pink velour sofa sits before a giant treasure-chest-turned-coffee-table, which is all but buried in copies of W. Along a wall of south-facing windows, there are three sewing machines, and over Teiken’s worktable, rolls of ribbon hang from the ceiling as would the pots and pans in the kitchen of a serious cook—always within arm’s reach.

“I surround myself with things I think are pretty,” said Teiken, whose ideas aren’t born in the sketchbook. Rather, she lets found objects and fabrics dictate the direction of each item of clothing she sews. “A button or a pin or a buckle might be the inspiration for a piece.” A pair of oversized, vintage buttons, each with a tiny, bead-worked constellation, served to inspire a satiny, cropped jacket. A bolt of white cotton fabric, screen-printed with autumnal treescapes, informed a light-weight sheath and matching trench. “Once I find that thing that’s interesting and fun, I can take my inspiration from there.”

So, where does Teiken turn in her perpetual hunt for beautiful fabric and notions? Although she’s been spending much time in New York City and Chicago of late, doing fashion shows and tending to boutiques that stock her ready-to-wear, she’s got two local standbys: Melrose Antiques, in the East Hennepin neighborhood of Minneapolis, especially for old buttons and beads, and, of course, S.R. Harris, the go-to fabric store for any serious stitcher.

Not surprisingly, the resulting aesthetic leans heavily upon pairing old with new. Teiken likes taking apart vintage kimonos and using them to make handbags with feather trim and shiny Lucite handles, or to detail outfits made from newer upholstery fabrics. An old tablecloth recently came back to life as a crocheted, strapless dress with a trim of pink satin pleats—a creation she calls the “sleazy Easter dress.” She has a taste for flowers and plant life; and there’s a proclivity for including giant fabric buttons, shiny beads, and oversized bows wherever possible. But Teiken denies having any preconceived wants of the raw materials she hunts. When something hits, it just hits. “For me, it’s not about any one designer or time period,” she said. “It’s all about the feeling I get from it.” —Christy DeSmith

My older sister and I have this vulgar habit of putting dibs on our mom’s best stuff. Pointing to the valuable Roseville vases, crystal aperitif glasses, and heirloom doilies that were hand stitched by our great-grandmother one hundred years ago, we’ll march through Mom’s home, saying things like “That’s mine someday.” This strikes me now as being rather sinister, but Mom considers the behavior perfectly acceptable. She likes knowing that something of her and our forebears will endure.

What remains taboo, on the other hand, is the matter of cold, hard cash and Mom’s liquid assets. It’s impolite to talk money, you know.

I can’t be the only ungracious child to have invested energy in approximating my mother’s net worth. My algebra: Neither of my parents had been big earners, per se. But Mom did bank a life insurance payout when dad passed away, about seven years ago. I’ve never known how much. Then my grandma died last summer, and Mom inherited a little more. She has been provided for, I guess you could say, and I’ve always expected a similar fate was in store for me one day.

The “greatest generation,” of which my grandma was a platinum member, saw the rise of the middle class and is thus said to have squirreled away oodles of dough. Grandma started her golden years much in this way, having inherited plenty of money from well-off in-laws about fifteen years ago. But years of spending on health care and prescription drugs, while also floating her not-so-solvent loved ones, ate away at Grandma’s initial six-figure nest egg. And she wasn’t unique in her way; the old folks, by and large, are dying broke these days. Their baby-boomer next-of-kin can now expect to inherit on average just twenty-nine thousand dollars, according to the Federal Reserve. That’s enough to buy, say, a new Volkswagen or dig oneself out of some minor credit card debt. But it’s hardly the stuff of legacy, and probably not enough to keep trickling down the family tree.

As for the big-spending grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Generations X and Y? Well, they’ll make due with far less than twenty-nine thousand dollars. The estimated inheritance for children whose parents were born between 1931 and 1947 is nineteen thousand dollars.

These sorts of dire financial predictions have become fashionable lately—as I suppose they always do when the next generation starts writing financial advice columns. I’ve been hearing about the financial debasement of Generation X since college. And now a whole crop of youngsters is claiming to be the most maxed-out generation in the history of the world, and they’re writing books like Generation Debt: Why Now is a Terrible Time to be Young and Strapped: Why Americas Twenty- and Thirtysomethings Can’t Get Ahead. (Considering the macro-economic picture—that is, the federal deficit—they may be right after all. But obviously, no one cares about that sort of insolvency; it simply “doesn’t matter,” as Dick Cheney famously said.)

Yet there is gloom and doom thundering on the horizon that cannot be ignored. One estimate paints the average American as having eight thousand dollars in credit card debt. Most of us are not saving for retirement, regardless of age. Our health care costs are in a reckless upsurge. Our Social Security “net” is fraying. And as the lines between socio-economic classes continue to blur, even those of modest means have developed tastes for the finer things—certain downtown lofts and seventeen-dollar-per-pound cheeses, say. It all adds up to not very much. And unless we’re so lucky to have a rich benefactor (or two—that’s how it goes), most of us can expect little relief in the form of wealth transfer.

Mom couldn’t give Grandma’s old furniture away. But ears perked up around the dinner table one night, a few months back, when Mom broached the forbidden topic and promised to share a “little” inheritance with each of her children. How much? When pressed, Mom later issued an exact figure—five hundred dollars. Chump change. Initially misconstruing what “little” meant, one of my sibs offended Mom greatly in asking for several thousand dollars up front. Said Mom, rather testily, “This is my inheritance. Someday you’ll get yours.” And that was the end of that. —Christy DeSmith

If you visit the P.M. Bedroom Gallery in Blaine or Woodbury, you might run into Jim Borofka, co-owner of the stores and one of the last waterbed salesmen in the Twin Cities. The showrooms at HOM, for example, don’t feature waterbeds, though the store was once called the Waterbed Room. Borofka accuses HOM of “disconnecting” itself from its history, of disavowing its former cash cow. But P.M. Bedroom also changed its name a few years back, from P.M. Waterbed, in order to expand its market, update its image, and, especially, to minimize what Borofka calls the waterbed “stigma.”

Nothing conjures the decadent 1970s quite like the waterbed. Firm in the mind is the image of a giant, free-flowing bladder of a mattress undulating to the rhythms of Sly & the Family Stone, vulnerable to both hoop earrings and spiked heels. People picture mirrors on the ceiling, mustaches, and smears of Gentle Emotion Lotion. Borofka says that occasionally a customer will call and say, “‘Do you have waterbeds?’ And I say yes. And they say, ‘Are you sure?’”

And then he goes on to explain that waterbeds are not what they used to be. Designs have improved since that first “pleasure pit,” invented by San Francisco State University student Charles Hall. The problems of old have been mitigated: Interior fibers or compartments slow water flow; most modern incarnations are “soft-sided,” meaning that water pouches are encased in foam, and resemble standard mattresses. This makes for a bed that’s resistant to punctures, but still offers what waterbed enthusiasts list as health benefits, including body-molded support, constant warmth to aid sleeping, and a lack of dust, mites, and other allergens. “We can sell a soft side and, fifteen years from now, that person is still sleeping on the same surface,” Borofka said. “It wears very well.”

Borofka has slumbered on a waterbed for decades, ever since leaving his family’s Wisconsin dairy farm to attend college in Eau Claire. “I drove to school in my dad’s old truck and one of the first things I did was pick up a hard-sided waterbed. I thought, ‘I’m really getting somewhere now.’” Borofka desired something new and exciting, a way to express his independence. “Everyone who purchases an adjustable air bed nowadays, that type of clientele purchased waterbeds back then. They were curious people into new things, new technologies, not afraid to push the edge.”

Who buys them now, I had to wonder. Borofka, who sells around seven waterbeds per week, said they mainly go to “people who think, ‘We got a good night’s sleep on a waterbed, we don’t care what the neighbors say.’” He’ll gladly sell a customer whatever type of bed she wants—spring, foam, air, water. But, he confided, “In a bar over a beer, I would say the waterbed is the best bed.” —Jennifer Vogel

This was the first interview I’d ever conducted with my shirt off. Standing before me in the mirrored pink closet was my subject: Lonnie Eiden, a nattily clad woman of supreme confidence, a professional bra fitter for forty years. “I think I’m a 34C,” I offered, playing right into her hands.

“Let’s see what you’ve got,” she said. She looked me over with the keen eye of a physician. And then came the assessment: “Oh, sweetheart.”

“Am I wrong?”

“We’re going to start with a D, a 34D. Boy, I’m going to see a D on you.”

I grew up believing that C is the ideal cup size, having heard it once on television or something. Undoubtedly, it was a meaningless distinction, sort of like the old claim that a long middle toe connotes royalty. Still, I believed that a woman’s breast should perfectly fill a martini glass. It shouldn’t clog a margarita tumbler. This notion, apparently, had led me to make a very common mistake, which is choosing bras that are too small. “Part of it is that there is a mental illusion about cup size,” said Eiden. “The minute you get to D or double D, people think huge and that’s not true. Cup size really doesn’t mean anything because we can make a person look much smaller in the right cup size.”

A too-small bra causes chest flesh to bunch up and shoulders to roll forward, warned Eiden, a stickler on matters of posture. “There isn’t room for the breast tissue in the cup, and then you start this process of bending over and you look heavier. Your breasts hang down and you lose that waist.” To compensate for undersized cups, she said, women often purchase bras with bands that are too large. These enormous bands ride too high in back, which leads to the snowman effect, something otherwise known as “back fat.”

The best a bra can do, according to Eiden, who was trained at an actual bra-fitting school in Minneapolis, is provide a woman with “breasts of stone.” Such stationary breasts, she said, can be had only after a professional fitting. “I just dread it when I see an article about how to measure because I know that in the next two months we’re going to be flooded with people who say, ‘I know what I am and don’t tell me that I’m not.’”

With Eiden’s estimable guidance, I strapped myself into the D-cup model. I fastened it with the snaps at my back, rather than connecting it in front and spinning it around. I leaned forward before snapping, so that my breasts fell into the cups. “Now what is the step three you forgot?” Eiden asked. Dutifully, I bent at the waist and shook, sending every smidge of chest flesh forward. Then I stood upright and looked in the mirror, newly sculpted, with cleavage like a smile. —Jennifer Vogel

When it comes to campers, there is the pack-only-what-you-need, leave-no-trace, love-your-mother variety, and there is the load-up-the-Explorer, don’t-forget-the-cappuccino-machine, outdoorsy-but-not-too-outdoorsy sort. There is also a third category, which fits between the two—motorcycle campers. More Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid than Lewis and Clarke, motorcycle campers pack light because they have to, but they ride because they want to.

Arriving at camp, even if it’s just an RV parking lot, is sweeter to the motorcycle camper because his arrival is never guaranteed. Riders face perils on the road that seldom bother drivers: shunting crosswinds, clouds of bugs, and deer at dusk. Every rider has a tale to tell about the buddy who lost control when his front wheel slipped on squirrel guts in the curve of a shady country two-lane. (No wonder there are so many “Bikers for Christ.”) Despite all this, motorcyclists live for riding season. At camp, they place a crushed can under their sidestands so that, under morning dew or hot tar, they’ll find their bikes upright when they awake, and they’ll be ready to hit the road again.

Now, I don’t know if cowboys (prior to Brokeback Mountain) ever got giddy about their horses. But back in 1999, when I got my 1979 BMW R65 and my pal Joe got his 1982 BMW R65, we were all motorcycles all the time. Old friends separated by ten years and a hundred miles were drawn back together by a love for boxer engines. It was a first-kiss type of excitement, and we were dating Twins.

During our first year as motorcyclists, Joe and I met more and more, often for increasingly adventurous rides. It started with easy, meetcha-halfways between Minneapolis and Winona, where beautiful Highway 61 hugs the Mississippi River skirting dramatic bluffs with dreamy sweepers. We rode whenever we could—day trips at first, then overnighters as we explored the joys (and limitations) of pairing camping with motorcycling. The riding season stretched deep into autumn.

That first winter was interminable. With our bikes frigid under dusty sheets in our garages, we talked about riding and exchanged jpegs of old Beemers nearly every day. We both read the Duluth-based Aerostitch’s adventure-riding catalog cover to cover, twice. Finally, after a week of tantalizingly sunny days in mid-March, we planned a rendezvous. The temperature was thirty-three degrees that Saturday morning. The cold battery resisted but the sleepy engine eventually turned over by the sheer power of my will to ride. It was 7:00 a.m., the roads were clear, and the sun was bright. Wearing long johns and several layers did little for my hands, which were frozen and aching before I had even crossed into St. Paul. By Hastings, I had to stop for a cup of coffee just so the cup could warm my hands, and I bought a second pair of gloves at a hardware store. I was determined to meet Joe at the rest area that overlooks Lake Pepin, just north of Lake City. We would ride along the river together, reveling in horsepower and torque on the highways, and slowing down in the small towns to admire ourselves, mirror images of tandem cafe racers, in storefront windows.

Motorcycling creates a strange bond. I feel no affinity for other people who drive crappy old Subarus, for example. Yet I have an immediate connection with other motorcyclists. Harley-owners groups are the classic example of bike bonding buoyed by branding. And it’s the same for Brit bike riders as it is for scooter lovers and so on. Why on earth do motorcycles draw people together when riding—helmeted and speeding along on noisy machines—is essentially a solo activity?

Ernesto “Che” Guevara, crossing South America in 1951 on a 500cc Norton with his friend Alberto Granado, described their adventure in his famous book-turned-film, The Motorcycle Diaries, as “two lives running parallel for a while … What we had in common—our restlessness, our impassioned spirits, and a love for the open road.” Those currents run deep, and none is more infectious than the lure of the open road. Whitman was inspired by it. So were Hopper and Fonda.

That bond, however, doesn’t mean riders engage in an intimate exchange of thoughts and feelings. (Here’s the narrator of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance trying to talk to his son, riding pinion: “I whack Chris’s knee and point to [a blackbird], ‘What!’ he hollers. ‘Blackbird!’ He says something I don’t hear. ‘What?’ I holler back.”) But when riders go through something—bad weather, beautiful scenery, or close calls—they go through it together. After years of weekend riding, Joe and I felt ready to go through (or make that around) something bigger: Lake Superior.

We spent a year planning the “Supe Loop.” With our first major debate (clockwise or counterclockwise?) resolved, we focused on being properly equipped for the six-day adventure. I drew a logo; Joe ordered it embroidered on ball caps. We agreed that my rank, thirty-year-old Timberline tent would suffice in lieu of buying something smaller, lighter, and fresher. We decided that if Joe could find a way to carry it, a spare gallon of gas was a good idea. I determined that Joe’s travel-size espresso maker was awesome but extraneous. Joe concluded that my tool kit was also extraneous unless I planned also to pack the six-hundred-page repair manual and a prayer card for St. Clymer, patron saint of lost causes.

It bears mention here that the 500cc Norton that Che and Alberto rode fell apart not even halfway through their journey. In the end, the Supe Loop was not a loop at all. I’d had my bike tuned up and prepared in every way imaginable. I had even packed a spare clutch cable should that part fail, as it had so many times in the past. But at dusk on the first day, fifteen miles from the Canadian border, it was a throttle cable that had frayed inside its casing that caused my motorcycle to accelerate out of control. I freaked out while Joe, calm as the placid lake below us, managed to disassemble, monkey with, and re-install the cable. He didn’t trust his tinkering to take us all the way around the lake, but it was a patch-job that could get us back home without a hitch. As we turned around and headed south, Lake Superior spread out before us. My eyes, however, bounced between the road and my tachometer, with nervous glances down at Dr. Frankenstein’s cruise control.

We enjoyed two nights of camping on that trip. Sips of Jack Daniels from Dad’s old camp-stove fuel bottle soothed our heartaches at the campfire that last night, as it primed our spirits for tomorrow’s ride back home. —Adam Demers

You probably didn’t notice, but due to a bureaucratic mix-up, there was no Shortlist Music Prize awarded this year. The “Shorty” was a newish but well-respected award that tried to recognize serious pop and rock bands for doing important new work, regardless of popularity. The main symptom of doing important work was selling less than 500,000 copies of any particular album—a prerequisite for the prize.

The first Shortlist winner, in 2001, was the Icelandic art-rock band Sigur Rós and they were emblematic of everything the judges were looking to reward with their new trophy. Here was a band deeply engrossed in unique aesthetic issues, rabidly exercising its “creative control” by producing odd and beautiful sonic art in a faraway place. Yet simultaneously, they became deeply influential in the mainstream recording industry. Like Radiohead before them, they became a shibboleth for all self-respecting musicheads. Their epic seventy-minute albums of exquisitely slow ambient rock are shamelessly anti-commercial; their CDs are often unmolested by song titles, liner notes, or credits. The band sings in a mixture of Icelandic and nonsense; they play their guitars with horsehair bows. (Sigur Rós play the Orpheum Theater in Minneapolis on May 8).

One could speculate on the prospects of a shoe-gazing art band like Sigur Rós by looking at, for example, the slow starvation of Spin magazine and the College Music Journal, the corporate consolidation of alternative weeklies, and how fast what’s cool and credible becomes mainstream and bland. Still, new undergrounds are constantly found deeper down, and there are new markets opening up to them. Free of the expectation of commercial radio celebrity, a band like Sigur Rós can succeed by capturing the attention of chic producers of TV shows, films, and advertisements. Sigur Rós licensed a song to the Wes Anderson movie The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and another to the Cameron Crowe-Tom Cruise flick Vanilla Sky. They’ve written with composer Hilmar Orn Hilmarsson and played with the London Sinfonietta orchestra. They’ve even collaborated with the godheads of art-rock, Radiohead. In short, cool still counts for something.

Sigur Rós formed in Reykjavík in 1994, and once their otherworldy, ethereal, minimalist sound got off the isle of Iceland, the band was quickly tagged as the next big thing out of that country since Björk. Critics loved the massive doses of reverb, organ, and strings, and the tempos that sounded like they were in hibernation. Riding on top of that nearly stationary wave was the thinnest falsetto voice, backtracked, multitracked, and degraded. Singing in a language he called “Hopelandic,” Jonsi Birgisson sounded like a trembling ingénue coming through an unreliable connection. While he sawed at his guitar, keyboardist Kjarri Sveinsson played one or two notes at a time, drummer Ágúst Gunnarson did more noisemaking than beat-keeping, and bassist Goggi Holm seemed not very busy at all. With the first flush of success, the group built their own recording studio in an empty swimming pool out on the Icelandic tundra. No one was surprised.

With his spare and beautiful 1978 recording, Music for Airports, Brian Eno coined the term “ambient music,” a genre that could serve as audio wallpaper, but was supposed to reward scrutiny the way Muzak couldn’t. Sigur Rós may be the first group since Eno to fulfill the promise of his invention—music as uncorrupted art for your ears.

But Sigur Rós’s is an inescapably Nordic interpretation. There is a deeply melancholic vibe in all of its music, a hyperborean sense of isolation and anomie. The first record released overseas, Ágætis Byrjn (1999), was spare and exposed. On their second record, (2002), the flight took on a new drummer (Orri Dyrason) and hit some turbulence and aural bombast. Their latest, Takk, revisits this density but with heavier orchestration—more strings, brass, glockenspiel, flutes, 3/3 time, vocal harmonizations—along with multiple layers of guitar distortion. It’s as if Nordic reserve has turned inside out, and passionately embraced itself. “Takk” means “thanks”—at once a light form of gratitude and a casual parting note, with overtones of finality. It may be the only word the band has ever used that your average English-speaking critic can understand.

On Takk, the sound structures are beginning to resemble commercial anthems and soundtrack epics; there is a lot of bona fide up-tempo rock ’n’ roll drumming. As it has matured, Sigur Rós has gradually abandoned minimalism and clarity for structure and complexity. The end result is that Takk sounds more urgent and impatient than its predecessors, as if the band were trying to make you understand its language by speaking louder and faster.

Listening to Sigur Rós’s albums, one is unmoored from lyrics and their meaning. The lyrics become part of the artifact, rather than a framework to establish its meaning—words as tones, not syntax. The voice is played like a wind instrument, not a percussion instrument. In this way, Sigur Rós is the antipode of hip-hop, the dominant form today. While it is true that a rap has lilt and flow according to the style of the rapper, the genre is inescapably about the words; it is still, at its roots, a form of performance poetry. Yet there’s no alternative but to consider Sigur Rós purely as sound; understanding the lyrics would, on some fundamental level, subvert the experience of their music.

Let’s be frank and admit that this is pure, blindingly white music. If Sigur Rós weren’t so opaque, and if anyone parsed anything malevolent in their music, the band might be accused of representing racial purity, the way troublemakers accused Joy Division in the eighties of being Nazi sympathizers. That’s unfair to both bands, because the “evidence” was circumstantial at best. (The swastika, for example, was a popular artifact with many pre-PC punks.) Still, it’s an interesting comparison. Superficially, Sigur Rós’s funereal packaging and imaging owes much to Factory, Joy Division’s famously artsy record label. At a more profound level, Joy Division appropriated the symbols and signs of World War II, most obviously with its name, which was what Nazis supposedly called the coteries of Jewish women they kept as sex slaves. “Sigur Rós” means “victory rose,” and although the band was named after Jonsi’s younger sister, it is a name that, at least in English translation, is also evocative of a World War II lexicon. On a tour of Dachau once, I was told that SS officers kept Jewish children caged outside in the winter; the cruel effects of exposure led the Nazis to call them their “victory rose garden.”

That’s an irresponsible association to make, but an irresistible one for a self-loathing white critic. Given hip-hop’s ascendance, not just in mainstream music but mainstream culture, it is hard to believe a band can exist that does not exhibit any sign of its influence. And yet here it is: a modern band that is so radically isolated and self-sufficient and uncorrupted that it becomes something of an anthropological curiosity. Maybe this sound is the natural outcome of Iceland’s homogeneous, insular society. Of course, insularity never stopped the English from tampering with the blues, skiffle, reggae, and the like—but then Iceland has never been the colonizer that Britain has. It is no crime to be white, and no misdemeanor to make music for yourself. And it is not entirely surprising that Sigur Rós is most popular among mostly white alt-rock critics and mostly white composers of modern classical music, while they do not register at all with commercial radio programmers and sneaker manufacturers.

Another way to pose this old riddle—whether a band can develop an uninfluenced, sui generis sound—is to consider why Sigur Rós are considered art-rock or alt-rock rather than world music. If these musicians are as strongly defined by their geography as people say they are, they should bear stronger marks of folk influence. Much has been made of their sound being a sort of audible analog for Iceland. No one doubts that place has a huge influence on sound, but musicians tend to study other musicians more than they study landscape. (Indeed, although in interviews Sigur Rós frequently dismiss “geographic determinism,” they have toured with and championed Steindor Andersen, a traditional Icelandic rimur chanter of their acquaintance.) Often by “world music” we mean non-American folk music with some sort of modern corruption, like Sweden’s Väsen, or England’s June Tabor, or the Afro Celt Sound System. Sigur Rós are probably the inverse of that—modern corruption inflected by elements of local folk. It is possible that they represent art-rock as a sort of trailing edge of identity politics, quite literally the last stand of the pale-faced artiste.