It was somewhat disconcerting for me to realise that almost nine years have passed since the first correspondence crossed myself and the architects of the sounds lurking somewhere near this website. This condition is entirely appropriate, given the nature of those sounds: they inhabit an area that is removed from the tedious plodding-forward of subdivided time, and have provied me a welcome vacation from that sorry invention in a quantity for which no units of measurement have yet been devised. Near the beginning of this correspondence, before I had read somewhere that the word referred to an illegal butcher's trade, I made an attempt to decipher the meaning of 'Stilluppsteypa.' My Icelandic dictionary provided these three suggstions: 'Stilla': to quieten, to appease; 'Upp': up; 'Steypa': to hurl, to pour out. To me, these definitions seem more fitting than what is apparently the actual sense of the term. Far from an act of clandestine sonic butchery, the Stilluppsteypa sound is a 'hurling forth of silences,' a confluence of subtle elements that shift amongst each other in a medium of stillness - elements that include not only the stifled groans of mundane time being violated, but also the thudding of dust particles against your skill during sleep; the hum of blood in your ears after you've held your breath for too long; the welcoming crackle upon touching one's genitals against an electrical transformer; the slow grinding down by the wind of those structures we stupidly assume to be invulnerable. The experience of at last meeting the trio at a performance in New York City after so many years of long-distance interaction was also disconcerting, although in an equally agreeable way. I am sure that I had constructed faces and personalities from out of the series of scrawled letters I had received, but these were instantly erased by the actual presence of the entities themselves: in my memory now, the true faces and personalities have always been associated with the names under the Icelandic postmark. These both new and old friends endured my endless photo-taking and retarded attempts at humour with good grace, and for this they will always have a place in my heart. It is only left for me to mention that, during the aforementioned performance, I was gripped by the peculiar urge to crawl under the table on stage and take a photograph of their legs, all lined up in a row amongst a tangle of audio cables. I refrained from doing so, feeling that it would be a poor introduction - and I have no doubt that they are grateful for my rare display of good judgement on this occasion. (approximated by M.S. Waldron in 2002)