Category: Music

Posted on

Iceland: Week 33

In a week that included the first day of spring, the weather in Iceland was still very much winter. As usual, it’s the wind that makes things harsh, reaching over 45 MPH and causing yellow travel warnings across much of the country. In less than two weeks I have a trip to Akureyri planned during Easter break, so I’m crossing my fingers that things improve.

Luckily there were some indoor activities to check out. The Stockfish Film Festival kicked off, and is conveniently held across the street from my apartment at Bíó Paradís. Yesterday, I went to two sessions, both focused on Icelandic shorts: five documentaries and six narrative shorts, each including a Q&A with the filmmakers. At least half of the films were directed by film students studying at the Iceland Academy of the Arts. I don’t know how it works at other film schools, but it was impressive to hear about the level of financial and expert support they receive. It sounds like there are people on staff to support lighting, sound — even intimacy coordination — during 10–12 hour shooting days, sometimes in remote locations. Film is one of the creative industries where Iceland punches above its weight, and this was a glimpse into the educational foundation that makes that possible.

It’s not just film students who are well supported. Earlier in the week I attended a lecture by Jens Schildt, a Swedish graphic designer who did extensive archival research into the Swedish business equipment company FACIT. His work is fascinating, and involved recreating some of the company’s typefaces and publishing a book. Because his collaborator was living in the Netherlands they were able to tap into generous Dutch funding for this kind of design project.

His lecture (also at Bíó Paradís) was organized by Iceland University of the Arts and the Association of Icelandic Graphic Designers. While talking to one of the design instructors, he mentioned receiving Erasmus funding to take his entire class of graphic design students on a trip to Belgium. Europe has always had more funding for the arts, but the contrast with America (especially under Trump) is so stark. Imagine living in a society that supports and rewards creative activities that don’t have an obvious commercial profit motive?

Jens Schildt presenting his archival research on FACIT at Bíó Paradís

March 18 marked the 100-year anniversary of Iceland’s first radio broadcast, and I attended the opening of an exhibition celebrating that milestone in the building where it happened. Loftskeytastöðin, which translates simply to “the radio station,” is a small building on the University of Iceland campus that I walk by multiple times a week. The main floor has a permanent exhibition dedicated to Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, the first woman president of Iceland, but the basement has rotating exhibitions.

There was a collection of some of the first radio receivers in Iceland, often with a unique story of how they came to the country. For example, one of the old shortwave radios belonged to a farmer who had taught himself German and wanted to listen to broadcasts from abroad to improve his language skills. Overall, the exhibition is small but interesting. I would have liked more information on the history of the building and broadcasting, but it focuses more on tangible artifacts from the history of radio.

Architectural detail on Loftskeytastöðin, the old radio station building.
I do, of course, love the design of old radios, particularly shortwave models with city selectors.

Finally, I attended the opening performance for Harmonic Tremor by Ben Frost and Francesco Fabris at The Living Art Museum. The installation is set up as a series of upward-facing speaker cones, filled with lava collected from eruption sites on the Reykjanes peninsula. As the speakers vibrate, the lava shifts and bounces, slowly escaping the cone to create a pile of dust surrounding the speaker stand on the gallery floor. These eight speakers were augmented by many others throughout the space.

The performance was composed from field recordings made at the eruption site, including sound recorded from contact microphones placed directly on cooling lava. It felt like you were inside the eruption itself: ethereal, immense, at times startling. I’ve followed both of these artists for years, but never seen them perform, so I feel lucky to have been able to attend such an immersive joint performance. It felt like a very Icelandic experience to walk back home, in 40+ MPH wind and snow, after attending a sound performance based on nearby volcanic eruptions.

Harmonic Tremor installation by Ben Frost and Francesco Fabris at The Living Art Museum.

Posted on

Iceland: Week 20

My exams are done and my papers are getting very close. The last few weeks have been a big push to wrap up the semester but it looks like I’m on track to finish before my brother comes to Iceland this week. I’m excited to have him visit!

I finished watching a four-part mini-series about the life of Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, the former Icelandic president, which is streaming on RÚV with English subtitles. The show, which shares production and acting credits with the excellent Blackport, was really well done — and I’m getting good about recognizing filming locations in Reykjavík. Elected in 1980, Vigdís was the world’s first female head of state and in Iceland she was the first single woman allowed to adopt a child. I enjoyed getting more of her backstory since I see references to her all over town. For example, my oral exam for my class in Iceland’s Foreign Policy was held in a building on campus called Veröld – House of Vigdís.

Last night I saw Júlía Mogensen perform at Mengi and got to see a halldorophone being played for the first time. It’s a unique electroacoustic instrument that looks like a cello but incorporates positive feedback into the process of playing. It’s the brainchild of Halldór Úlfarsson, who takes an iterative approach to design, incorporating feedback from musicians and evolving it over time. I’ve been really enjoying the album Electroacoustic Works For Halldorophone by Martina Bertoni lately, so it was great to see it being played and get a better sense for how it works.

Júlía Mogensen playing a halldorophone at Mengi.

Noted & Done

Posted on

Iceland: Week 17

I finally got to walk on a glacier. I’ve seen them from a distance when hiking alongside their imposing presence on the Laugavegur trail, and up close on a boat to the calving front in the Jökulsárlón glacial lagoon. I have memories of a planned glacier walk in Alaska that was scrapped when I was twelve years old, visiting my Aunt Debi with my grandparents, but that was too long ago to even remember the circumstances. This week I finally got on top of (and even inside!) the glacier Sólheimajökull, an outlet of the the larger Mýrdalsjökull ice dome sitting atop the Katla volcano.

Sólheimajökull terminus
Icebergs reflecting in the glacial lagoon

 Sólheimajökull is probably the most accessible glacier in Iceland, which is why I was able to visit it on a day-trip from Reykjavík. It’s a skinny, 12 km long valley, that terminates in a glacial lagoon that wasn’t even there in 2009, but grows 50 meters larger ever year as the glacier retreats due to rapid melting since the turn of the century. There is a timelapse video on Vimeo that captures the change from 2007 to 2018, and the Glacier Change website has numerous slide-over comparison photos, the most dramatic of which compares photographs from 1930 and 2023. My guide thought there may be only a couple more years where it will be possible to access the ice from easy approach we took, as the front pulls away into the valley.

The surface of Sólheimajökull is partly covered by black volcanic ash from the nearby Katla volcano, which hasn’t had a major eruption since 1918. Thin layers of ash can accelerate the melting of of the ice, since the darkened surface lowers reflectivity and increases heat absorption. But if the layer of ash is thick enough it can actually slow melting by acting as an insulating blanket.

Ash covering on the Sólheimajökull glacier

Once you get past the lagoon and actually up glacier the thickness of the ice becomes more obvious. What isn’t apparent when looking at the lagoon is that it’s 60 meters deep, which as our guide pointed out is nearly the height of the Hallgrímskirkja church in Reykjavík. That’s why exploring a glacier requires caution, because that surface is full of crevasses, which are cracks, but also moulins, which are formed by flowing water and can create drop offs all the way to the bottom. A glacier is not solid ice, there is always water melting and flowing within it.

The tour I took was not just walking on the glacier, but ice climbing into the glacier, and the photos above show the moulin that our guide identified for us to climb. The second shot, leaning over the edge, I took while attached to an anchored tether that hooked on to a harness. I would not want to lean over this edge otherwise, as a slip and fall would have been disastrous — I couldn’t see the bottom.

The crampons you wear for ice climbing are a little different than I was used to, mainly the addition of spikes near the toes, as it requires kicking the ice wall hard enough to stick and support your weight as you reach up and secure your next position.

Our guide identified a “blue ice” spot that was strong enough to anchor the rope, which could supposedly support up to 1,000 pounds. You strap the rope to your harness and then essentially just walk backwards over the edge of the moulin, walking down the ice wall with the tension of the rope supporting you. Then, once you’ve gone as deep as you’d like, you turn vertical and stab your feet into the ice to begin climbing out.

Making my way up
Almost to the top

Ice climbing was a lot of fun, and much easier once I got my technique down and stopped trying to pull myself up from the ice axes. Ideally you are stuck to the wall by your toes, and only use the axes to balance and take the next step up. Our guide was a Frenchman named Steve who was very patient with climbing newbies and apparently quite the adventurer himself. He’s planning a solo, 550 km unsupported ski trip across Greenland next year. I have photosets on Instagram of the glacier and a separate one for ice climbing. if you want to see more photos.

I would highly recommend this day-trip through Arctic Adventures for anyone who is interested. The transport option from Reyjavík also includes stops at the Skógafoss and Seljalandsfoss waterfalls, the latter of which is skipped later in the winter due to lack of daylight. But luckily for me, I got the opportunity to walk behind the falls as the sun was setting.

Behind Seljalandsfoss at sunset

The other big event this week was Iceland Airwaves, a 3-day music festival that grows to fill the whole week with numerous off-venue events and takes over the entire downtown area. I had a festival pass, and saw a least a dozen acts over four days. All of the venues are within walking distance, so it’s easy to check out a performance and decide to move on midway through if you’re not feeling it. In general it was a little too heavy on the dance/club side of things, but there was huge diversity with folk, hip-hop, neo-classical, rock, and electronic in the mix. Some of the acts I wanted to see simply went on too late for this middle-aged man, and jam-packed venues are less fun once it gets past drunk o’clock — but overall it was a fun experience.

The festivals is a showcase for Icelandic musicians, but also had lots of the UK, Faroe Islands, US, and EU countries. I knew very few of the names going into it, but enjoyed the sets I saw by Jelena Ciric, lúpina, Ólöf Arnalds, knackered, Antony Szmierek, RAKEL, Hania Derej, Milkywhale, Lea Kampmann.

Noted & Done

  • A recent survey noted that the Icelandic sheep population has dropped by 100,000 in the past ten years, leaving only 350,000 sheep in Iceland. That means that today is the first time there has ever been more people than sheep in Iceland.
  • The USD/ISK exchange rate is still bumpy but is finally creeping back up. It reached its nadir right as I moved here, so any improvement is welcome from my perspective.
  • Finished watching season 3 of The Diplomat, which is no Borgen, but continues to hold up pretty well as a US political drama. Given that it’s been part of my studies I was delighted to see the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea show up as a plot element.

Posted on

Iceland: Week 8

It took two months, but it finally happened: I was in the same room as Björk. It was bound to happen eventually, given that Reykjavík is barely larger than Ann Arbor, MI. But in my imagination, the Iceland that Björk exists in can’t possibly be the same one where I live my daily life. If I was to see her shopping for groceries at Bónus it would shatter that illusion entirely, so thankfully the circumstances of this encounter still had an appropriate level of mystique. Apparently, on every full moon, Björk plays a DJ set at the record store Smekkleysa, which was founded by The Sugarcubes. She promotes it to her 2.2 million followers on Instagram, but since only a tiny fraction of them live in Iceland it draws a manageable crowd for an in-store performance. So. Much. Fun.

Overall, it was a big music week with the Extreme Chill experimental music festival spanning 5 of the last 7 days. Now in it’s 16th year, the program was held at venues all over town and my favorite sets were by Patricia Wolf, Seefeel, R-O-R, and Drew McDowall.

There was also a film screening of Hrafnamynd by Edward Pack Davee, who lived in Iceland as a child when his father was stationed at the now-closed NATO base. The through-line of the film is about his memories of that time, formed and influenced by slide photography of his childhood, combined with numerous return trips to Iceland as an adult. It’s a beautiful portrait of early-70s Iceland, ravens, and the limits of memory. Patricia Wolf did the soundtrack and performed live ahead of the screening.

Walking near the harbor yesterday I noticed a unique vessel called the Tara Polar Station docked behind Harpa. I looked it up and found a good article that describes how it can withstand -52°C temperatures and provide living accommodations for 18 people. It’s first real expedition starts next year, which will last 18 months, including 14 months drifting in sea ice. That’s a pretty tight environment for 18 people to spend over a year stuck in the ice!

The research station will be docked in Reykjavík through October 20th, long enough to play a role in the upcoming Arctic Circle Assembly, which I’ll be attending. I hope to learn more about it during that event, and maybe find a way to get an onboard tour.

With the arrival of September the days are getting noticeably shorter here. The Sun Graph indicates that only now does Reykjavík have true “Night,” previously only reaching “Astronomical Twilight.”

One side effect is that it’s dark enough now to see aurora, and the last week had enough solar weather for me to spot the Northern Lights. There’s obviously light pollution from the city, so they were pretty faint with the naked eye, but the long exposures on an iPhone let you to see what’s hiding in the darkness.

Northern Lights over Mt. Esja

In general, the sky was very impressive this week. Here are a couple more examples:

Sunset over the Seltjarnarnes peninsula
Rainbow in front of Mt. Esja, taken from the Nordic House

The final thing I’ll point out this week is a fun website called The True Size where you can move countries (or US states) around a typical Mercator map projection to see how they compare. We all know that map projections are distorted, but a tool like this really helps to show how dramatic those distortions are as you reach the poles.

Funny enough for me, since I know these places so well, Iceland is roughly the size of both Pennsylvania and the lower peninsula of Michigan.

Noted & Done

  • I watched Summer Light, and Then Comes the Night, an Icelandic film based on the novel by Jón Kalman Stefánsson. It’s my favorite of the three books I’ve read by him, and despite finishing it over 2.5 years ago the movie brought back imagery from the book so vividly that at times it felt like I’d watched it before. Unlike many Icelandic films, this one is easily accessible; it’s available to rent or purchase on Amazon Prime.
  • I’m planning a trip to the Westfjords in a couple of weeks for a long weekend. If you’ve been, and have recommendations, let me know! I plan to stay in Patreksfjörður and Flateyri.
  • Wikipedia tells me that 81% of Icelanders never smoke, but I guess I go to a lot of the same places as those 19%. I find smoking to be noticeably more common here, or maybe it’s just that there isn’t the courtesy of standing 10+ feet away from an entrance, so I end up walking through smoke more often.
  • I had to wrangle with all kinds of problems on the Moped Army website this week. I guess it’s par for the course, but running a website in 2025 is an especially unforgiving chore. The site gets hammered by unscrupulous AI bots scraping the forum to build their models, search engine traffic is down because Google just serves AI answers instead of sending people to the site, and the lack of traffic combined with plummeting ad rates means revenue is cut in half. I’ve been running the site for 28 years now, and the amount of time I have to spend fending off attacks, scammers, and other bad actors is much higher now than any point in the past. I’ll keep on keeping on, but all of these additional headaches don’t bode well for the health and longevity of the independent web.
Posted on

The Fireside Tapes

A YouTube account called The Fireside Tapes is posting videos from the Fireside Bowl in the late ’90s. That venue, at that time, was a big part of my life. I hadn’t yet moved to Chicago, so I’d grab a friend and drive 2.5 hours from Kalamazoo to catch a show. We always drove back the same night, blurry eyed but happy, speeding home on I-94 with the windows down to stay awake.

It’s great to see these videos since very few people recorded shows during those years. It was costly and cumbersome, so at most there’d be one person with a Hi8 camera or a DAT recorder. Aspiring photographers took photos, but the film and processing were too expensive for most people.

Even at very low resolution, seeing this era of the Fireside Bowl brings back a lot of memories and reminds me how young we all were, bands and audience alike. Venues like this tended to blur the lines between the two, with the stage barely a foot tall and no backstage area or green room. After a set, the band would move their gear to the side and join the audience.

The Fireside Tapes has an Instagram account you can follow, with custom title graphics for each upload. It’s such a great way to bring a bit of branding, consistency, and high resolution to these low-res archives. I’m not sure who is behind these accounts, but thank you!