Valgeir Sigurdsson was, has been, and will continue to be cooler than any other producer on the planet…and not just because he calls Iceland home.

Like a lot of studio boffins, he discovered music and then set about becoming involved with it immediately – by the age of 16 he was working in a small Reykjavik studio, learning the ins and outs of the recording technique in the best possible way, by rolling up his sleeves and getting down and dirty with reel-to-reels, tape, and the like. Before long he was in charge of the studio, before heading to London to study at the acclaimed SAE Institute.

In 1997 he returned to Iceland and set up Greenhouse Studios, and began working with an array of local bands and artists. As fate would have it, somehow world-renowned chanteuse Björk heard of him, and she approached him to work with her on the soundtrack to Lars Von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark. Since then, he’s worked with the diva on nearly all her albums.

But where many producers would lock themselves into a certain style of music, what sets Valgeir Sigurdsson apart is his desire to work with a variety of artists – from the sonic tapestries of Sigur Rós to the Australian electronic composer Frost to Will Oldham in Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy mode, on the spellbindingly beautiful The Letting Go. In some ways he’s become a tastemaker.

“I never think about in those terms,” he says, “and I think it’s probably not a very healthy pressure to have when you’re making music. It’s always hard when you admire someone and you go to make an album with them, because you’re always comparing it to their previous work, and you don’t want to make anything less great. The fear of not succeeding is there.”

However, he says, working with Björk for the first time on SelmaSongs in 1998 was a different matter altogether. “Although I really admired her music I wasn’t a big fan of it until we started working together,” Valgeir says. “Before that I’d listened to [her music] quite a bit but I wasn’t really a fan. Don’t get me wrong – I became a much bigger fan after working with her, and then you have that kind of pressure or expectation as also that collaboration happened very differently to how things normally happen.”

Initially Valgeir was brought onto the project as a programmer, working on making sure the sounds were in the pocket. “Our working relationship developed from there and I never really knew when we started working on Dancer in the Dark whether I was going to be working on the whole project or just the couple of songs that we started with. But it grew into a long and steady relationship, working together for eight years.”

That sort of close working relationship can lead people to begin to intuitively understand what the other wants to do, where they are completely in sync – much like a married couple. “That definitely happens. I think that happened quite soon for us, because we came from the same place and had a lot of the same reference points. And speaking the same language I think was definitely a part of why we worked together for so long.”

Now, for the first time, Valgeir has taken his famed production techniques and applied them to his own songwriting, with the release of his debut album Ekvílibríum. “It’s a very health extension of what I’ve been doing in the last two years,” he says of his debut solo release. “I’ve always approached music as a musician or a composer rather than a technician, and why I’m in music is to be creative and although the technical side can be very creative to it’s never something that I saw myself as being.

“I got into the studio as a tool to create music,” he explains, “and then other people picked up that I could be the bridge between their music and the technical side. I’ve always written music and had material over the years, and then I started to think about putting it together maybe three years ago – it was at the back of my head for a long time, but I couldn’t really find time to focus on it. I finally decided that now was the time, being encouraged by people that I played the demos to, and finding that people were really interested in contributing to my album too.”

As such, guests such as Bonnie Billy and Fawn Fables are spotted throughout Ekvílibríum, as well Australian musician J. Walker, a.k.a. Machine Translations. “That collaboration came about in a different way – I’d met him before we went into the studio before we went into the studio to work on the song that is on the album.

“I went to Australia to go to a writing workshop,” he says of his down under sojourn, “and I was hooked with him by our publisher, and we had four days of workshop with a new person everyday, and the goal was to write and record a song in a day. The song came out of that workshop and it felt very natural for me – it felt like a song that should be on my album. He also released it on a Machine Translations EP.”

Valgeir Sigurdsson’s Ekvílibríum is out now.