For a few more hours, you can watch a hypnotic livestream of Iceland’s landscape rolling past.
Last night at 9pm Reykjavik time, Icelandic band Sigur Rós began livestreaming a trip along the country’s longest highway, set to its own dreamy post-rock music. The stream will last for 24 hours, in celebration of yesterday’s summer solstice. June 20 was the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere, and Iceland only got about three hours of night.
The background music is generated in real time from new and unreleased Sigur Rós songs. The journey follows 1330 kilometers of highway Route 1, which runs around the perimeter of the country. It is being streamed on YouTube and Iceland’s national broadcast channel.
The stream is pretty much an exact cliché of the Icelandic countryside: Pastoral hills, cotton-candy clouds, glassy fjords, dreamy ambient music, and an occasional sprinkling of sheep.
It’s the Icelandic take on “Slow TV,” a type of mundane, meditative television program that became popular in Norway in 2009. In April, the New York Times streamed video on Facebook $META of long walks in parks, which proved a similarly welcome distraction from weekday productivity.
At time of writing, there were six hours left of the Sigur Rós stream.
Image by Navin75 on Flickr, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
