We wake up frantically on Friday morning for an 11am pickup to play a lunchhour show at Verslo School, an Icelandic equivalent of Cegep in Quebec. Our European booking representative, who has just flown in from London, shows up for an introduction to a groggy band (we’ve never met him before). Pile into 2 vehicles sent by the school and stop at an electronics store to buy power outlet converters before loading in and setting up on a cafeteria stage. Our set begins at 12:30 and by our second song the room is packed, and we are waking up to the reality that we are playing our first show in Iceland. I get pretty nervous for the first time in a long time. No caffeine, my voice isn’t warmed up, a little hacked, shaking a bit, but we get through ok and the kids are totally into it. Afterwards I look around for our booking guy, but he’s nowhere to be seen. Brennan, our drummer says something like, “oh yeah, he went into a bakery before we left to get a bagel for me.” My heart sinks as I realise we’ve left him back in town, through a case of two-car confusion. Luckily we meet him at a coffee shop on Laugevegur St. and he’s totally forgiving. We head back home and try to get some napping in before our next show, which is at 6pm at Skifan Records, our “off-venue” show.

At 5 we have a beer, and head to the store for set-up. It’s a quick walk from our apartment. The place seems pretty empty. We soundcheck and wait around just before 6. People begin to pile in, and by the time we start playing it’s full. The set goes much better than the one in the morning, and we sell a few copies of the ep, and go home for dinner.

Head back out at 830, pick up a slice of streetza, which takes curiously like ravioli everywhere in Reykjavik, and get to the Art Museum just in time to see the last 4 songs of The Drums set. For all of their recent hype, they’re good, but sound is washed out badly in the 3000 capacity venue. The bassist is bopping around like a muppet, and the lead singer is relentlessly praising the crowd for their support. They are obviously very excited, and for good reason. It grows on me, and by the last Neighborhood #1 (tunnels) styled jam, I’m into it. Didn’t get to hear “Let’s Go Surfing”, but “I Felt Stupid” is good.. you can watch it on their myspace here: http://www.myspace.com/thedrumsforever

our Austrian roomate (right) Lucas

Leave the Art Museum, somewhat reluctantly as Casiokids are next up, but I really want to see composer Daniel Bjarnason and Tim Hecker at the Bedroom Community label showcase. This is going on at a beautiful old lake-side theater called IDNO (pronounced eethd-no).  There are almost 20 players onstage for Bjarnason (http://www.myspace.com/danielbjarnason): every string instrument imaginable, brass, midi-equipped grand Steinway piano, harps, and he is playing a Wurlizter with his back turned to the audience, conducting his mini-orchestra. This is a  clip from the show courtesy of KEXP: http://vimeo.com/7287653

and our German roomie, Thomas.

Tim Hecker, a Montrealer who has collaborated with Richard D. James, takes the stage next. His sounds are super deeeeeep. In typical drone audience fashion people sit or lay down on the floor. I do the same. It’s relaxing, and the nuanced textures send bottomless spine-shivers. This kind of music has to be experienced live. Our Austrian roomie, Lucas is leaning against one of the sub woofers. I wonder if he’ll have any teeth left when it’s over.

Seeking something a bit more up, we go to BATTERID to see what’s going on. There is one English man on stage playing acoustic guitar, and singing along to some crazy beats generated by a bunch of samplers, and a keyboard. This man is James Yuill (http://www.myspace.com/jamesyuill), from London, who is slaying with some beautiful folk-type songwriting transposed to dancefloor-friendly arrangements that the wasted Icelanders are devouring. Sick. Sick. Sick. I dance hard for a while, and this is all a natural buildup to what will be one of the best shows of the festival:

The Field is one of my favorite techno bands. Ever. This was probably my most anticipated show of Airwaves, and it completely delivered. I saw him at Richards earlier this summer, opening for Juan Mclean, but the Airwaves set was much better, partly due to a superior sound-system, and also enhanced by the inclusion of a live-drummer, who looked like the Techno Viking. This dude was the REAL Techno Viking. Aside from their third, spectacle-clad, sampler button-pusher, these are the baddest, most gnarly electro-nordics you will ever witness. Drinking champagne on-stage they destroyed the thrashing, speedy, audience with animated versions of Over The Ice, and The More That I Do. It was seamless, and totally inspiring. I want this every weekend, and judging from his tour schedule, if you live in the EU, that might actually be possible.

photo: Steve Louie

 About a month prior to the festival, an elf named Hildur, got in touch with us through myspace about singing backup vocals on our performance. I was pretty excited about the idea and sent lyrics and music. We chatted a bunch about Icelandic bands on skype, and during one of these conversations I asked her if she would be able to translate the lyrics to Requiem for a Scene into her language, so that I could try learning them for the show.

Two days later the following appeared in my inbox:

Sólin skrökvar ekki að þínu föla andliti er tekur að vora

Heitir vinar gera skarpar tungur okkar bitlausar

Gerðu mig að barni færðu mig aftur í sand á strönd

Bátar og þari við munum sólbrenna út í sjó

En þú eyðir öllum þinum tíma í að vera töff fyrir krakkana á staðnum

Og þu eyðir öllum þinum peningum í að vera töff fyrir krakkana á staðnum

Því þessa daganna

Er ekkert nema vice magazines

Og kókaín

Og þröngar gallabuxur

Flótti frá börunum og monteal magazine straum

Brýndu þina heykvísl og brenndu niður internetið

Í þynnkunni þú síður alla simana í tekettlinum

Rændu svo Djeiinn fyrir utan settið hans

Því þessa daganna

Er ekkert nema vice magazines

Og kókaín

Og dj-eijar

Og þröngar gallabuxur

Gerðu mig að barni færðu mig aftur í sand á strönd

Bátar og þari við munum sólbrenna út í sjó

 En þú eyðir öllum þinum tíma í að vera töff fyrir krakkana á staðnum

Og þu eyðir öllum þinum peningum í að vera töff fyrir krakkana á staðnum

Því þessa daganna

Er ekkert nema vice magazines

Og kókaín

Og dj-eijar

Og polka dots

Og þröngar gallabuxur

I entertain serious reservations about being able to make any phonetic sense of this, but she insists it’ll be ok. On Thursday afternoon we meet in Skifan Records, Airwaves admin headquarters. She has a car, so we drive out of the city to pick up a keyboard from her parents’ house and bring it to her jam space. The house is literally at the end of Reykjavik, her driveway backing onto a vast lunar landscape of nothingness. Coming from the Pacific Northwest, Iceland’s almost complete lack of trees is hard to get comfortable with.

In the car she puts on a local hardcore hip-hop band called XXX Rotweiller. Apparently the song is partly about the economic crises, and how “your mom is a bitch”. It’s actually pretty good, and I end up seeing them live on Saturday night at Batterid club after our show. We get to the jam space, which is actually a room within an industrial workspace run by her electrician dad and two woodshopping uncles. These guys greet me with a bit of trepidation but we start talking about Mugison and we are cool. I teach Hildur the lyrics for Old World Lies & Insects (she ends up singing the entire 1st verse of OWL on her own at the Art Museum), and after we begin the very arduous process of trying to teach me whatever you see above for Requiem. In the end I resolve to sing only the first verse in Icelandic, and then trade english, icelandic on alternate lines for the 2nd. We’ve got a recording of this performed, and I’ll be putting it up on myspace sometime soonish.

 After about 2 hours of trying this out I actually feel pretty comfortable with the pronunciation, but realise there is no way I’ll be able to memorize it. Decide to bring lyric sheet with me and tape it to the top keyboard. She drops me off just outside of the city centre and as I walk through the dark streets back to our apartment I feel euphoric thinking about playing our Verslo University & Skifan Records shows the next day (friday).

Back at the apartment, things have gone all reality TV. Someone has drunkenly drank someone else’s 6 pack of tall-beers, during the day, and unintentionally?? replaced these with non-alcoholic ones from the Bonus Pig supermarket. Some sloppy accusations ensue, but the debt is made up for with some terrible vodka produced in Manchester we bought in the airport.

I leave the squat and head back to Sodomo to see Portland based Kid Crash, who originally hail from New Mexico and used to have Zach Condon (of Beirut) as their keyboard player. We flew over with them from Seattle, and they are super cool guys, who play very tasteful mathy scream emo rock. It rips and is very precise.  Please check them out here: http://www.myspace.com/thekidcrash

photo: The Grapevine

Also check out The Grapevine’s review by Sindri Eldon (yeah Bjork’s son) here:

http://www.grapevine.is/Home/ReadArticle/Airwaves-Thursday-Sodoma

Afterwards I head home on my own to bed, as we’re getting picked up early for the Verslo show in the morning. Make a sandwich in the kitchen and the rest of the band comes barreling noisily through the door. Bryan, our trumpet player, takes me aside and says: “you know those brass players in Sigur Ros – Heima? They are gonna join us at the Art Museum on Saturday.”.  hmmmmm. I freak out a bit. It sounds ridiculously fantastic. They are coming over tomorrow to figure out some parts. I sleep very well.

bryan davies, mr. brass lasso

Ok, so far I haven’t written anything about Iceland Airwaves festival itself.

Wednesday (1st official night):

Reykjavik has a thriving post-punk/core scene. I plan on heading to a club called NASA for the Kimi Records showcase to see two bands in particular: “Reykjavik!” & “Sudden Weather Change”.

photo: Leah Gudmundson

The evening begins with a meal at Prikid, the closest an Icelandic restaurant might come to an American diner. Prices are pretty good and clientele is composed of university student regulars. After a relatively soggy and meatloafy burger we  head back to our apartment where Lucas, our Austrian exchange student roommate suggests: “Let’s have 30 minutes of concentrated drinking and leave” (You really have to imagine this being said in a German accent). No one disagrees with him, and soon our posse of 10 is strolling down Laugavegur St. towards the town centre.

photo: Leah Gudmundson

If I haven’t already mentioned this, the city is small, and most bars or clubs worth going to are restricted to 3 main streets: Laugavegur, Bankastraeti, & Ausurstraeti, which are all basically the same thing, but at different grades of steepness, separated by a couple of intersections. There is also a small square which should probably be re-named puke-or-fight square, since this is mostly what happens there on weekend nights. Nearby, in a cheap pizza joint,  I witness an awesome  brawl between a terribly loud, drunk and angry American woman and a very sleazy looking Spanish man. The woman had made some comment about his extremely greasy hair, which he did not take lightly. Said some nasty stuff to her, and she responded by grabbing his bangs and slamming his forehead on the counter. Things quickly deteriorated. He punched her in the neck, or shoulder, she started kicking, and the mess was eventually (reluctantly) stopped by the cashier dude, who looked less than surprised by the situation.

photo: Piet Langeveld

We get to NASA and Reykjavik! is on. They’ve been dogged locally by their name (like on the level of a washed up cock-rocker from Vancouver naming his new album “Vancouver” … yeah, a big WTF to that) but are a slaying band. Sound is somewhere between Fucked Up and The Two Koreas with growling/screamish Icelandic vocals. I like it a lot, but there is a lot of talking between songs I wish I could understand. The guitarist is the editor for The Grapevine . I meet him later and he’s real nice, super funny, and the same can be said for most native Icelanders I meet on this trip.

photo: Leah Gudmundson

I leave NASA and head to club Sodomo, where Dynamo Fog is playing. Their bass player, Sindri Eldon, is Bjork’s son and is playing an inverted heart-shaped electric bass, with little mini pearly hearts embedded in the neck. Their sound is defined by an exclusively electronic, sample-based drum kit. Guitars are tastefully fuzzed to a Weezer effect, and their songs are fast, catchy, and most to break-beat type rhythms. The next night I end up talking to Sindri at the same place, where he is sitting notoriously by himself in a dark corner, glaring at the band on stage with eyes like black lasers. I’m told that he is a ruthless music critic, or aspires to be, and has famously critiqued his own mothers catalogue. Our conversation is pretty limited. I tell him I liked his band, he says thanks, asks me why I’m here, he has heard of Brasstronaut, says he may check it out, and adds: “the only reason I’m here is because I left my distortion pedal on stage yesterday”.

photo: Leah Gudmundson

Go back to NASA to catch Sudden Weather Change, who verge on the shoutier vs. screamier side of things.  They are also good, but at this point I’ve taken in too much of this kind of music and end up walking around town looking for something else. It is however, Wednesday, and since bars close at 1am during the week in Reykjavik, the best option seems to be sleep. But sleep is hard to come by when sharing a room with 5 people who are all coming in at different times, snoring and coughing. End up listening to The Field on headphones for an hour while chatting on facebook with people in Vancouver. I’m realising that going home will be difficult.

photos: Leah Gudmundson

On Saturday, before playing our official Reykjavik Art Museum show, we were invited to do an acoustic set at the tourist information centre downtown. In exchange, they offered one free 4×4 glacier, waterfall, and lava-beach tour. I’ve just come home from doing this, easily one of my top five ever life experiences, and am now sitting in a coffee shop called “Hemma & Valda”  resembling something along the lines of a Wednesday night hang at the Brickhouse in Vancouver, trying to hazily recollect last week’s festival events. 

Continuing from where I left off on the last entry, we got in  Monday morning, and spent the day walking around town in a jet-lagged trance. It’s worth mentioning that there were 10 of us from Vancouver (6 band members, 1 producer/sound-tech, and 3 friends along for the ride). Our two bedroom apartment had been rented by Airwaves, and also ended up being shared by three  Erasmus exchange students from Germany, Austria, and Holland. These people each had guests of their own, bringing the tally to 17 sharing one kitchen, and more importantly, one bathroom.

As you may know, Iceland derives almost all of its power from geothermal energy. For practical purposes, this means that potable hot water, delivered directly from the source, smells strongly of sulphur, which if you’ve ever been to the Banff Hot Springs, smells, well, like shit. This is especially true during shower-taking time, when the entire apartment is filled with a pungent haze, and is combined with the aroma of real poo taking, by as many people as I have already described, one after another, every hung-over morning.

This aside, the place is quite nice, exchange students are great, and the very Scandanavian interior decor reminds me of something out of a Lars Von Trier film. Our land-lord Arni, is a dj/film-maker who wears a super-poofy neon blue down jacket, baggy Addidas track pants, David Koresh glasses, and has long, stringy pale hair. Apparently he’s a local legend, and has a weekly DJ night at a nice bar called “Bakkus”. When he received us, he cracked some light jokes, telling us to watch out for the Nazi (Thomas, the German student), and asking if we had a faggot in the band.  “Faggot” as he quickly explained, was an outdated term for “the bassoon”. I did not know this. Anyway, Arni is pretty cool, in a very eastern euro kind of way.

So the first day wasn’t terribly eventful, but was overwhelming in terms of constantly reminding yourself that you are really in Iceland, and that somehow your band will be playing the country’s biggest music festival in a matter of days. I walked around, got a plate of fries and beer (for $15) and started taking pictures of the buidings. Perfect bright triangles set upon little squares and rectangles, most coated in painted corregated aluminum sidings, same thing for the roofs. Find myself relentlessly seeking signs of economic downfall, but in the city core, there are surprisingly none, or few. Shops seem full, people happy, but later I am told this facade is generally restricted to the Reykjavik 101 area code.

After taking a very strange early evening lag-nap, I awaken to Germans/Austrians/Dutch drinking in the kitchen. They are heading down to Bakkus for fussball (euros take this sport VERY seriously) 4 of our party join, and the vibe is very chill.  I’ve been inspired to take it up on a much more serious basis when I return to Vancouver, after being schooled to the point of social out-casting by a particular Dutch girl named Piet. The night was great, we got drunk, and I conversed with the bartender about the local art scene until what we were talking about no longer made sense.

For the past week I’ve been living in a 3 bedroom apartment with 16 people, all sharing one bathroom, in downtown Reykjavik. As of several hours ago most of them have gone back to Vancouver, or Vienna, or Stockholm, leaving me with an uncomfortable feeling of tranquility after 5 days of psychotic  Iceland Airwaves partying.

Because we had a late start getting going on this blog, I’ll jump around a bit and share some highlights of what we’ve witnessed/experienced with you, starting with our arrival to Keflavik Int. airport last monday:

Our 645am landing was dark and turbulent, followed by a somewhat unnerving wind-whipped shuttle bus trip to the outskirts of the city (the driver had to stop off the highway at one point since we were literally being blown off the road by 90km/hr gusts). The landscape was jagged and bleak. Someone remarked that it reminded them of Calgary which, aside from the weird giant fragments of lava, was kindof true.

We were dropped off at a transfer depot just outside of the city centre. This place had a truck-stop style diner inside, and was serving boiled sheep’s heads, complete with little yellow teeth and eyes intact. Forgoing acute nausea, I ordered a “breakfast” and got two slimy eggs with at least 10 pieces of bacon for about $15 can.  Bathroom stalls were equipped with blacklights, which now, a week later seems odd considering I’ve seen absolutely no evidence of street poverty anywhere. Signs of economic downfall however, were somewhat apparent:

Walking into town you see a gigantic half-constructed apartment building. At about the 20th floor, there is one small man wearing a neon orange jumpsuit plinking away at some reinforcement beams. Later I learn that this was supposed to become the new “metropolitan music building”, but due to the “crises”construction has ceased, and may not continue, inevitably resulting in a demolition. Given my relatively limited interaction with locals (aside from much slurred bar banter) I don’t feel like I’ve met enough local people to remark about how they appear to be handling their new financial peril. However, no one really seems excited about discussing it.

More on the festival tomorrow…