IS IT ART???? IS IT MUSIC?? DOES IT MATTER??
Kría Brekkan packs a powerful punch with her tiny voice. Catching her at Kaffistofa, the art space turned off-venue venue was wonderful, even if I had no idea who the hell was playing due to her small size and the unusually tall crowd. It’s worth mentioning that Kría Brekkan is formerly of múm, and she released a backwards album with that guy from Animal Collective (the tiger?). So you know she rather leans towards the avant-garde, but it works in her favour. She kind of sounds like Yolandi Visser of Die Antwoord, with a whispery voice and experimental tendencies. She’s got this thing going on where her voice is high pitched and low pitched at the same time, and when combined with strategic use of reverb, it’s got a spooky kind of enveloping power. There was a moment when everyone started singing along to the line “It’s all too beautiful,” and it was almost like she had commanded us to by casting a spell.
The real star of the performance was the projection of a pomegranate behind Kría as she played. It suffused the entire space with a ruby glow and enhanced everything exponentially. Maybe because it was in an art gallery space, or maybe because you can never go wrong with a projection of a pomegranate, but this image really tied everything together. To quote Marge Simpson, “Whatever it does, it’s doing it right now.”
She’s playing Fríkirkjan tonight at 21:00, and even if there won’t be a pomegranate behind her, it’s so worth checking out.
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