A Duet Of Dancers : Milkywhale On Music, Mirrors And Making A Comeback

Electropop powerhouse duo Milkywhale made a big splash in the Icelandic music scene when they were first sighted back in 2015. They became a regular fixture in the festival circuit, playing at Iceland Airwaves and Sónar Reykjavík, as well as Reeperbahn in Germany and Roskilde in Denmark, to name a few.

They even played a pair of packed shows on a literal whale-watching boat during Menningarnótt. At the height of their hype, the vinyl of their self-titled debut album even appeared at the aptly named Graywhale Records in my very distant hometown of Salt Lake City, Utah. Then, after playing their last few shows in Germany in 2019, Milkywhale mysteriously vanished. This is their story.

A Milkywhale is Born

Okay, that’s a lie. Nobody vanished, but we’ll come back to that later.

“It all started with a lie,” Árni Rúnar Hlöðversson says with a sly grin. I’m sitting with the band in their temporary studio, which I immediately dubbed The Milkywhale Mansion. It’s actually a small movie theatre with plush seats and glitzy details across the ceiling.

Milkywhale comprises singer, dancer and choreographer Melkorka Sigríður Magnúsdóttir and producer Árni Rúnar, best known as the musical mastermind behind the beats of iconic Icelandic party band FM Belfast.

It all started with a lie.

Melkorka says she was a total “FM Belfast groupie” and, inspired by their legendary live shows, was interested in working with original music.

“So I wrote to Árni,” she says. “I basically sent him a cold email, introducing myself and asking if he wanted to work with me on a dance performance. We got a grant from the art fund to do it and then when we met, I said, ‘I have no interest in doing a dance performance. I just want to make music with you.’ So it was kind of like luring him into it.”

And that’s the lie that started it all.

The rest came naturally to the pair. “We enter a room with nothing,” Árni explains. “Maybe some lyrics, but no pieces of songs ready or anything. It’s very different from most other collaborations. Working with some people, I wouldn’t feel comfortable entering a room with nothing because that’s just not the process we have. But the way we do it makes it so easy.”

Working (201)9 to (202)5

“We made our whole first album just in Árni’s living room with a nice cup of coffee,” Melkorka says. The band name comes from the way that Melkorka would explain her own name to people while studying dance in the Netherlands: “melk,” the Dutch word for milk, and “orca.”

Inspired by the story of a single mysterious whale that sings at the abnormal frequency of 52Hz — meaning that it is unable to communicate with other whales — the first iteration of “Milkywhale” was a one-woman show at Tjarnarbíó.

Duets are really my form of collaborating.

The performance introduced the persona of Milkywhale, a lonely being desperate to find connection, featuring interspersed monologues of movement in absolute silence with upbeat pop songs. The show was a critical success and quickly evolved into an equally successful touring music project known for its high-energy live shows. Things were going great; Milkywhale had finally found her tribe.

“It was very intense and we played at so many places,” Melkorka explains. “We travelled quite a lot. And we always liked to kind of not do the normal things… And then we kind of both got nine to five jobs,” she concludes.

Melkorka founded the Iceland Innovation Week, which she describes as being like Airwaves, but for innovation, while Árni opened a web agency. “Music used to be my hobby,” he says. “That turned into my job. And then programming was my hobby. And then programming became my job and music became my hobby!”

Although Milkywhale had sunk to the depths for a well-deserved rest, the pair continued to collaborate over the past years with “Ok, bye,” an annual show as part of Iceland Innovation Week.

“We bring together climate enthusiasts and artists in a big theatre spectacle,” Melkorka elaborates. “So it’s like a conference meets theatre. It’s all founders, investors, policymakers, academics and politicians, but then we crack it up with all kinds of music pieces.”

Milkywhale Resurfaces

Despite the duo’s other projects, Milkywhale has surfaced again. “It started with a lie and it returned with a lie,” Árni says. “Because Melkorka said, ‘All right, we’re going to do a dance [performance] and we need music for that.’ So I start to think about how we can approach that. And then she’s like, ‘But we’re making pop music again.’”

Their new collaboration, Hverfa, was produced for the 2024 Reykjavík Dance Festival. “The approach was actually some of the most fun I’ve ever had,” Árni admits.

“We just made pop songs. Then we basically ripped them apart to make the music for the dance piece, just parts of the songs and slowed them down.” Melkorka adds, “And then we took some elements of the dance performance songs and we placed them back into the pop songs.”

That’s how a new Milkywhale album was written. “I feel like the pop album is mirroring the dance performance,” she says. “And the music that we are doing is mirroring the music that’s on stage.” Hverfa means to disappear, but also forms part of samhverfa, the Icelandic word for symmetry or mirroring.

This element of duality is important to their process. “Duets are really my form of collaborating,” Melkorka clarifies. “Me and Árni, we are a duet. This is a duet on stage, a duet of two dancers. My favourite collaborations have always been duets.”

While the duo have already wrapped up their first run of Hverfa, it will be performed again in January — and that’s only the beginning for Milkywhale’s comeback. Their new single “Breathe In” has just dropped and there’s at least an EP in the works.

“It could even become an art museum installation,” Melkorka teases, “Like it’s a whole Milkywhale world. I don’t know where it’s going to lead, but I think we are a live band and we love to do live things.”

Though what forms the duet will take in the coming months remains up in the air, Melkorka notes there’s one thing she does know for sure: “I need to get my party stamina up!”

Listen to Milkywhale’s latest track “Breathe In” on available streaming platforms and keep your eyes peeled for more music via their Instagram @milkywhalemusic