Hörður Sveinsson
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Mischief, Mayhem & Hip-Hop With Iceland’s New Yule Lads
The Yule Lads are the thirteen Icelandic Santa Clauses who descend one-by-one on the thirteen days before Christmas to play tricks on Icelandic children. Their mother, Grýla, a mountain Ogress, eats badly-behaved children; her partner-in-crime is Leppalúði, another ogre and Grýla’s third…
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Hacking Politics: An In-Depth Look At Iceland’s Pirate Party
Alþingishúsið, or The Parliament House, is a hulking grey stone building that sits on the edge of the sleepy Austurvöllur square in downtown Reykjavík. It’s the seat of Iceland’s Alþingi, an institution that was famously inaugurated in the year 930 by a…
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Rythmatik: Iceland Airwaves Rookie Card
Name: Hrafnkell Hugi Vernharðsson Band: Rythmatik Hometown: Suðureyri in Súgandafjörður, the Northern Westfjords Genre: Rock ‘N’ Roll Pre-Season: “For a long time, I was the black sheep of my family. I had no interest in music. My brother started playing instruments way…
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Running Up Those Slippery Steps: Bjarni Bernharður’s Journey Through The Darkness
Poet and painter Bjarni Bernharður Bjarnason is a unique presence in the Icelandic art world. He has endured a life of hardship, marked by poverty, negligent parents, acid, insanity, domestic violence, murder and incarceration. He is also a prolific artist. Since his…
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The Heart Of Darkness In The Age Of Bullshit
There’s been much (some) made in British discourse of the phenomenon of cupcake fascism. If you’ve ever been to London, you might already have a vague, instinctive awareness of what this entails. If I could boil it down to five key elements,…
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The Rock Renaissance
Rock in Iceland has been overshadowed by some of the great things happening in the indie, hip-hop, metal and pop genres over the last decade, but there appears to be a rock renaissance in Reykjavík at the moment. It’s dirty, it’s loud,…
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Music Champions Rythmatik Embrace Musical Diversity, Play For The Love Of It
It’s not often that a music journalist is picked up for a ride to an interview by the band’s mother. But the short story of Rythmatik is already one made up of firsts. Perhaps most significantly, they’re the first band from the…
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Future Perfect
On “The Story Island,” a fresh young crop of writers is busy carving out a space, making way, creating a culture all of their own, in defiance of what came before. Much like their predecessors, and their predecessors’ predecessors Icelanders’ rich literary…
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The Attack Of Comic Realism
Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurðsson’s second feature film, ‘París Norðursins’, or ‘Paris of the North’, revolves around a 37-year-old man, disoriented, as it seems, after a breakup, and his relations to various people, not least of all his chaos-factory of a father. While the…
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Keeping The Romance Alive
In our third and final instalment of “Mexicans: They’re Everywhere,” we meet Libertad Venegas. Prior to her first visit to Iceland, the only thing she knew about the country was that it was home to a famous singer called Björk. For Libertad,…
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The Endless Bubble Of Overblown Expectations
In the spring of 2007, when the Icelandic financial bubble was reaching its peak, the Ministry of Industry held a press conference to announce it intended to undertake an environmental impact assessment of oil exploration off the coast of Northeast Iceland, near…
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Making Airwaves Flow
As the carnival of new music that is Iceland Airwaves approaches, the anticipation in the air is becoming palpable in Reykjavík. The festival pre-game is in full swing: there are posters all over town, the schedule and accompanying app have been launched,…
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Welcome to Reykjavík
The odds of you being in Reykjavík are not great. The greatest part of mankind is elsewhere. It is scientifically proven. When I was little, I would often ask myself why I had been born in Reykjavík. Is it a coincidence where…
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Grapevine Exposes Sordid “Music Trip” to ‘scandinavia’s sodom’
A fortnight ago, the Grapevine hitched a ride with cover stars Retro Stefson, Ólafur Arnalds and Hjaltalín as they made their way to Oslo, Norway. Their mission: to perform at the annual by:Larm Nordic showcase festival and charm the socks off Scandinavian…
