And so it begins again, another Iceland Airwaves music festival. Thanks to the miracle that is modern travel it only takes seven hours for us to go from Seattle to Keflavik, Iceland’s major international airport. Door to door from our house to the front of our Reykjavik hotel? Just about 12 hours, give or take a few minutes. Which is something completely insane that we all just sort of take for granted. How long would a trip from Seattle to Reykjavik have taken a hundred years ago? If I was fortunate I’d have maybe been able to do some flying to get across the US at least. But if not… maybe a week on a train to the east coast, followed by at least another on a ship. Add in waiting times we might be talking a month or so to make the journey one-way. And yet here we are, only mildly inconvenienced and able to watch movies as we while away the hours enclosed in a climate-controlled tube flying five miles above the ground at roughly 80% of the speed of sound.
The downside of the Seattle-Reykjavik trip is you arrive early in the morning – we were at our hotel by 6:30AM, and they didn’t have a room ready for us. So we checked our bags and hit the streets. If you’ve never been to Reykjavik, you might be surprised to learn that in the nation’s capital city almost nothing is open that early. A couple of bakeries, a couple of coffee shops. That’s it. Fortunately the weather cooperated, which in Reykjavik in November is code for “it wasn’t raining”, so we fortified ourselves with pastries and coffees and wandered around the sleepy, dark city in a jet-lagged dream-like trance. By the time we got into our room we’d been awake about 24 hours straight and were starting to get a bit goofy. Fortunately the chill of the outside air was there to keep us awake long enough to catch a few shows the evening before the festival officially began.
Our first music stop was the wonderful record shop/performance space Space Odyssey to see French performer Roukie (aka Julie Trouvé), accompanied by Icelandic bass clarinetist Úlfur Eldjarn. Roukie (below) plays what I’d describe as dream-pop. This is normally something I wouldn’t have sought out, but it was a wonderful performance in the small room, which at full capacity holds maybe 40 people. I particularly enjoyed her sensitive and dreamy cover of KISS’ “I Was Made For Lovin’ You”, which changed the entire vibe of the song, making it feel exposed and vulnerable.
It’s been a long-standing tradition for us to grab a pie at Reykjavik Pizzeria on the night of our arrival, and we stayed on trend this year. Fully fortified we went back to Space Odyssey to see its intrepid owner, Pan Thorarensen, play an ambient set alongside Þorkell Atlason and double-bassist Borgar Magnason (below). The trio performed what was to my ears a nature-influenced set, replete with the sounds of birds and running water. It perfectly fit my outside-of-time brain fog, taking me by the hand on a wandering journey through a mystical landscape.
I almost called it a night after the soothing ambient experience, but I had just enough gas left in the tank to stroll over to Smekkleysa, aka Bad Taste Records, the label originally founded by members of the Sugarcubes. The downstairs record shop moves racks and tables out of the way to allow it to become a small venue which comfortably holds about 50 people.1 Virgin Orchestra (below) was on the bill, the trio comfortably fitting the small stage area and playing a set of post-punk jams for an appreciative crowd.
This is my 17th trip to Reykjavik, a city that feels an awful lot like a second home. Doing some rough math, I’d guess that, excluding cities I have in fact lived in, Reykjavik is the place where I’ve spent the second most time in my life, falling a bit shy of Los Angeles, a city I used to travel to often for work. While it’s very comfortable in its familiarity, it’s also been interesting watching the city change over the years between our first visit in 2004 to this year. Lots of old haunts are gone, seemingly all replaced by either tourist shops or hotels. It’s a shame on many levels. Locals have been priced out of the city center and many of the small clubs have closed, often making way for new hotels to house the ever-growing number of visitors each year (which, in all fairness, includes me as well). Hope isn’t lost though, with new spaces like Space Odyssey and Smekkleysa stepping in to fill the gap, at least a little. Given the amount of music coming out of Iceland these days, the creativity seems undiminished, and for that I remain grateful.
- And uncomfortably holds about 125 based on my estimate made while crammed in there for a show the following night… ↩︎