After the previous week’s hectic live music schedule around Reykjavík, having just a pair of bands on at Organ seemed almost a waste of time and space but thankfully at least one group more than made up for the lack of numbers…

Despite having a capital city that sits a snowball’s throw away from the North Pole and boasts a population smaller than that of the London borough of Barnet, Iceland has a growing musical and artistic culture that would leave many far larger…

How does it work from a practical viewpoint having half the band living on a different continent, now that two members (Árni R.H. and Lóa) have recently moved to New York? Árni R.H: Árni [V.] is coming out in November and we’re…

Fated by neighbouring cubicles their freshman years at the Academy of the Arts, Mr. Silla & Mongoose knew they were destined to be creative partners. After conjoining workspaces at the Academy where they study visual arts, Silla and Mongoose, Sigurlaug Gísladóttir and…

“Sometimes, I think it might be fun to be in just one band, and focus on that,” says young musician Þórir. “But the reason I am in so many bands is that you form a band, and then the others don’t have…

Ben Frost originally studied music in Melbourne, Australia, and began making a career as a sound artist in the great down under. Of course with a name like that Iceland was the only possible destination for a change of environment. He has…

What started out as a one-man project in the eastfjord town Egilsstaðir some two years back has quickly transformed into the more engrossing acts of the Icelandic music scene. Raggi, one of three siblings, took the computer he had used as his…

The second annual Skullfest festival will likely be remembered as the year’s sweatiest show, which is a good thing. TÞM, the night’s venue, closely resembles a storage basement: four walls, no windows and, as logic dictates – when you cram in more…

As a live performer, Chris Cornell is an ontological challenge. By all accounts, he is a grunge-god, a member of a selected club that includes him, Eddie Vedder and Kurt Cobain. But, as Cornell himself pointed out, this show covered “a lot…

I remember being in Austria as a small kid, probably in 1988, and I saw the cover of the album Birthday by the Sugarcubes in a storefront window in Vienna. For me it was probably the first manifestation that someone from Iceland…

The Iceland Airwaves web site, at www.icelandairwaves. com, is a great resource in this respect, as it lists all of the performers, links to their MySpaces and even doles out free mp3s of most of them. Ticket holders and music enthusiasts –…

The two-person mosh-pit gyrating to Jakobínarína’s Jesus was spilling beer onto the crowd. It wasn’t their beer, they definitely didn’t look old enough to buy, but the man in the crisp grey suit with freshly groomed hair and an even fresher beer…

Let’s take it from the top. When did you start playing drums? That’s a story to tell. From a young age, I was always interested in playing drums. My dad was a wannabe drummer and that interest was very contagious. I was…

Jens places a small cold bottle of white wine, a glass and a chair on the stage. A light hush falls slowly over the crowd as he picks up his guitar and steps up to the microphone. “Oooooo,” he whispers. In the…

Attending the final night of the Reykjavík Jazz Festival, I did not expect much. Stórsveit Samma (Sammi’s Big Band) has never excited me much and Brooklyn’s Antibalas was totally foreign to me. Jimi Tenor was the only artist I’d enjoyed prior to…

“Uhm. I guess we started around 2003–4. Sometime then. We put out an EP called Our Youth Is Wasted; we didn’t tour much on that, just put on random shows here and there. We then put out a split single with First…