Product details

• Audio CD (12 July 2004)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Format: Maxi
• Label: EMI Music UK
• ASIN: B0002BK9KS

With perhaps typical Icelandic perversity, Sigur Ros's Ba Ba Ti Ki Di Do is perhaps the most esoteric release of their pretty wilful career. Written for octogenarian US choreographer Merce Cunningham's Dance Company's 50th gala performance, Ba Ba Ti Ki Di Do is more than 20 minuites of new instrumental music based around music-box piano lines, percussive sounds derived from ballet shoes and the fractured syllables and tap dancing feet of Merce Cunningham himself. The whole sounds something akin to The Exorcist score married to Byrne/Eno's "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts".

First performed alongside Radiohead's similarly commissioned piece at Brooklyn Academy of Music last October, Ba Ba Ti Ki Di Do forms part of the Cunningham Dance Company's Split Sides programme, wherein the elements of choreography, music, set design, costume and lighting are chosen randomly on the night by the throw of the dice. Ba Ba Ti Ki Di Do contains three separate tracks, respectively 'Ba Ba', 'Ti Ki' and, yes, 'Di Do'. In the spirit of the commission, these were initially written to be played in any order, but, having lived with them, the band like it best when they occur in the sequence presented here.

The artwork incorporates elements of Robert Heishman's set design for Split Sides, as well as Merce's stick-figure notations for choreography. It comes as a special digi-pack CD and one-sided 12-inch that also features an etching from Merce Cunningham on the reverse side.