In a dim concert hall in Reykjavik, Iceland, a scent blooms. Notes of bergamot mingle with iris and white musk. An ambient tone swells as hypnotic floral forms drift across a large projection. Here, at Fischersund’s scented concert during the Reykjavik Arts Festival, it’s hard to tell where one sensory experience ends and another begins.
Since 2017, the Icelandic perfumery and art collective has built an entire practice around making scent tangible through music and visual storytelling. It’s a family affair: the project is led by Sigur Rós frontman and artist Jónsi, his sisters Sigurrós, Ingibjörg, and Lilja Birgis, as well as their parents. Jónsi and his brothers-in-law, Kjartan Holm and Sin Fang, preside over Fischersund’s music. Like one of their immersive events, the group’s creative processes resist distinctions.
Fischersund scented concert in Reykjavik. Photo: Min Chen.
“For us, creating a perfume is creating art,” Lilja told me during a visit to the Fischersund store in Reykjavik, housed in Jónsi’s old studio. “We go all in on a concept and just develop it together. The idea sparks music, the music sparks a poem—there’s sparks flying everywhere. It’s feeding each other in a way.”
The collective has become such a fixture on Iceland’s creative scene that it was tapped by the Reykjavik Arts Festival to devise a bespoke scent for the event. Like Fischersund’s other fragrances, No. 101 borrows from local nature and landscapes, bringing together arctic angelica, chervil, and black currant. “We wanted to lift them up a little bit and give them this platform of admiration,” Lilja said of these herbs, which are often overlooked and unwanted.
The Fischersund greenhouse installation in Reykjavik. Photo: Min Chen.
The scent—delicate and moist, with a touch of bitter—was dispersed in a foggy greenhouse installation in downtown Reykjavik, its ground carpeted with withered grass. Typical of the group’s perfumes, this one is accompanied with an expressive poem to stir yet another of your senses. “Fingers digging up sorrel and dandelions,” it reads in part. “Freshly fallen snow on a forgotten trampoline. Black currents fall from bare branches, one by one.”
One Man’s Nose
For a collective with immersive ambitions, Fischersund started small, with one man’s nose.
A self-taught perfumer, Jónsi had been experimenting with the olfactory arts for years, sometimes using fragrances to center himself, Lilja said. It took his sisters’ urging for him to release one of his inventions into the world: No. 23, which was picked out of 100 scents he had created. The perfume leans into his Icelandic heritage, in particular his memories of working in his father’s garage. Hence the smoky notes of anise seeds and Icelandic Sitka spruce, with a slight tang of tobacco.
Jónsi’s “scent organ” at the Fischersund store in Reykjavik. Photo: Min Chen.
Fischersund now boasts a fine line of fragrances—from the fresh spring of No. 8 to the musky No. 54—with Jónsi composing their accompanying scent poems. At the same time, he has continued to concoct smells as part of his solo visual art practice, using scents to vivify his sculptures and installations. He’s a meticulous perfumer. When I spoke to him ahead of his 2023 show at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, he called fragrance design “a bottomless pit of disappointment.”
“You do hundreds and hundreds of experiments and nothing works,” he continued. “It is extremely hard, probably the hardest thing I’ve done in my life.”
The Fischersund store in Reykjavik. Photo: Min Chen.
Lilja recognized that perfectionist streak in her brother. “That’s where the sisters come in,” she explained. “It’s a very long process of trial and error and he could go on forever. It’s us who are like, ‘Jónsi, it’s ready!’”
Notes and Notes
Channeling those scents into sound, however, has been more smooth-going—possibly because, as Sin Fang put it, “the nose of the house is a musician.”
The trio behind the Fischersund sound has dreamed up stirring ambient soundscapes in response to the collective’s perfumes, often taking cues from their ingredients or concepts, Holm told me. “It’s been surprisingly natural.”
The Fischersund store in Reykjavik. Photo: Min Chen.
Their recent concert in Reykjavik—their first in Iceland—was centered on No. 1, part of Fischersund’s Faux Flora collection that captures the life cycle of a plant from first bud to last breath. The Faux Flora project debuted at the National Nordic Museum in 2024; the group plans to release the accompanying LP in the fall.
At the event, the sounds duly moved from emotive to elegiac, with animated visuals by Ingibjörg depicting bulbous seeds, blooming flowers, and sprays of herbs. Amid the proceedings, a man wove through the crowd bearing an absolutely massive bouquet of flowers doused with No. 1. Incense was burned.
Fischersund scented concert in Reykjavik. Photo: Min Chen.
“Music and scents are also very similar in so many ways,” Sin Fang added. “In the structure of a good perfume, you have your bottom notes, mid notes, and high notes, which is kind of the same way you put together music. They’re both so connected to your memory and they can be so powerful together.”
A Creative Playground
Fischersund can next be smelled at Sigur Rós’s immersive listening experience at the Schwarzman Centre in Oxford, the U.K. From June 26 to July 19, “ÁRA” will unfold in a hand-built environment, airing live recordings of the band’s orchestral world tour in full spatial audio, with scents by the collective adding a new dimension to the spectacle.
Such a form of immersive storytelling, Holm said, comes natural to a company—and family—of artists. In fact, according to Holm and Sin Fang, there have been a surprising lack of bumps along Fischersund’s journey.
“We are all very like-minded when it comes to the approach to art in general,” Holm explained. “We just seem to like the same things, whether it’s an audio or visual thing. It’s our own little playground.”
The Fischersund family. Photo courtesy of Fischersund.
Sin Fang also revealed that the siblings went without pay for the first seven years or so since Fischersund’s founding and have only recently begun seeing the rewards. Yet the venture’s true return seems less financial than creative. As Holm put it, there is little distinction in the family between work and play: “The only thing we think about is Fischersund. It’s very effortless.”
“Everyone has worked 100 percent to make this work, so it’s really fun for us now, like a flower that’s blooming,” said Sin Fang.
“In this conglomerate of ours,” Holm added, “it just blends very well together.”
Like any good perfume.