Grayson’s Friday Night Iceland Airwaves Diary: Off-Venues & Blown Minds

I started off my second day with a visit from the Ghost of Airwaves Past. Milkywhale burst onto the scene as a festival favorite in 2015. By that, I mean that I (and at least one other Grapeviner) literally went to see all four of their shows over the course of the festival and wrote about it every single day. Their last performance was in 2018 and, boy, have we missed them.

Milkywhale in 2016 (The Reykjavík Grapevine)

Fronted by singer, dancer, and endearingly cheerful partymaster Melkorka Sigriður Magnusdottir and backed by the Árni Plúseinn, the mastermind behind the beats of legendary local party band FM Belfast, this duo know how to pump up the audience. They managed to get the entire bar on its feet and dancing at 16:00 on a Friday afternoon, a feat that I’ve seen even bands on bigger stages struggle with this week. After all these years of radio silence, they even blessed us with some new music. So with a smile on my face and a Milkywhale comeback on the way, it seems like it was actually a visit from the Ghost of Airwaves Future.

Dressed in Mexican wrestling masks and trashy track suits, three-peace electro-funk Revenge of Calculon pumped out a steady stream of mouth-puckeringly funky beats in Lucky Records. They’ve played off-venue every year since 2015, making their performances a kind of cult tradition amongst the festival regulars. A handful of folks even came sporting their own masks to match. I later learned that this is another part of the annual tradition: whoever is able to dance “like an absolute space monkey,” to use the frontman’s own term, wins their own mask. The bassists in the back alternate between jamming and busting out the most cringeworthy unknown-white-guy-at-your-cousin’s-wedding-type dance moves, which I say with utmost respect and cannot stress enough how perfectly it complimented this scenario. I found myself asking, “Where have I been all these years that I was wasn’t here?” They’ll be playing again tonight at Loft Hostel at 20:00, so you might see me making my bid for the last mask of the season.

I had a brief interlude from the party madness with MRCY at Kolaportið. Somehow sounding both contemporary and retro, they offered up all the soul that I didn’t realize I was missing from this electro-packed start to the day, with powerful vocals and smooth rhythms. Although I’d never heard their music in my life, it somehow evoked a kind of nostalgia I couldn’t quite place and quite honestly, kind of moved me.

But it would be Charlotte Adigéry and Bolis Pupul at the Art Museum who would not only move us all, but get us all to move ourselves as well. Backed by club-ready, infectiously groovy dance anthems, it was their lyrics that punched me in the face. Their ability to tell stories on the dancefloor is truly unparalleled. How can I be dancing to a song about paying artists in “exposure?” How can I be dancing while Charlotte describes being objectified by strange men as a 13-year-old girl in a school uniform? How can I be dancing to a song about racism and the legacy of immigration with lyrics like, “Go back to your country, where you belong (Go back, bye-bye) / Siri, can you tell me where I belong? (Take a hike-hike) / Go back to the country where you belong (Don’t ask why, why) / Siri, can you tell if the road is long? (Have a nice flight)”?

In addition to their insanely catchy beats and master storytelling, they performed their track, “HAHA,” in which Charlotte laughs maniacally to the beat, breaking into a hysterical cry, and returns to laughing for the full duration of the 3-minute track. I’ve honestly never seen anything quite like it. I laughed, I cried, and I danced the whole damn time, placing this performance in the top spot for this year’s festival so far.

The only thing that could possibly have kept my interest after my head basically exploded in the previous set was Alice Longyu Gao. When I walked into Kolaportið, she was just finishing a slow, twinkly harp solo and commented, “That was my gay song.” Next, she launched into a song called “Let’s Hope Heteros Fail, Learn, and Retire,” which begins with a marching-band-like intro worthy of a stage musical before it explodes into trap beats, clashing and guttural screaming.

The rest of the set followed suit, blending hyperpop and nu-metal, shifting mid-song from singing to rapping to talking to screaming to cutesy K-pop inspired choreography. It was so spectacularly unhinged in every conceivable way that it exorcized all the feelings in my body and left me with nothing to feel for the following sets. Everything else paled in comparison.

Check out The Reykjavík Grapevine’s Iceland Airwaves Diaries, publishing daily throughout the festival to bring you all the good times.

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