Photo via Prins Póló's web site
October is Iceland Airwaves month. You’ve heard about it in Seattle, in part because KEXP is promoting it and broadcasting from Reykjavik, my old home. Airwaves used to have an enormous impact on my life: as the editor of the Reykjavik Grapevine, I started the policy of reviewing the Iceland Airwaves festival completely– every band. I also started importing foreign journalists to help me. With the help of a lenient publisher and an amazing staff of designers and photographers, we even put out daily issues of a magazine dedicated to the event.I’ll comment on the music in a second post, but, quickly, I’d like to point out that every year Airwaves offers the casual music fan a chance to hear Icelandic music that you can’t otherwise access unless you’re on the island. Yes, you should go to the festival. But until then, you can go to IcelandAirwaves.is and see and hear about 200 great local musicians.
The great local musicians, almost universally, are not those that are broadcast on the radio. Pop makes it onto the radio. Accessible pop. Which is fine. But Iceland creates a huge amount of more compelling music. Check out the site. And click around. As a quick primer, I’d recommend Prins Póló (very quirky folk-inspired musician with great hooks and imagination), the composer Valgeir Sigurðsson, and the slightly prog rock band who are heroes in the Icelandic art community, HAM.
Photo by Hilda Gunnarsdóttir, via Snorri Helgason's Facebook page
For good folk pop, you should hear Mugison (who is something like royalty in Iceland), Pétur Ben og Eberg who create tunes that would make Matthew Sweet drool, and Snorri Helgason (who is coming to Seattle this Friday).
Okay, now about a bonus that I think is a nice feature of the festival. All concerts at Iceland Airwaves are covered. The journalists who do it are asked to be as honest as possible. It’s a rare, rare thing. The result is a kind of journalism you don’t see many other places.
One of my old staff journalists is still writing for the paper, a good musician in his own right, Sindri Eldon, and here’s his review from this year’s featured show.
You can read scores of other reviews here. Imagine if that kind of writing were allowed in other markets.