Dark Music Days: From Teenage Bedroom To Vibrating Metal Plates

Live concert review from the cutting edge

As the days are still awfully short, this past weekend Dark Music Days embraced the darkness outside and celebrated contemporary music with a four-day festival. It is one of the oldest music festivals in Iceland, yet continues to be the festival that brings new sounds and experimental music to the big stage of Harpa.

One piece that keeps on reverberating long after its final note, is Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir’s Intraloper, premiered by brass ensemble APPARAT. Behind the musicians hang vibrating metal plates, illuminated by ominous red light. Before APPARAT even starts playing, the sound of vibrating metal already fills the space with suspense. Slowly the ensemble comes to life: snoring, whispering and stretching as if an organism is growing and pulsating in the room. The light switches to cold white and for the first time in the piece, the brass instruments fully utilise their sound. Sound continues to resonate through the metal sheets, even when the instruments are not playing. It is as if there is always something lurking behind the ensemble, a composition that happens in the margins.

Bára Gísladóttir makes two appearances at this festival and impresses with both. The premiere of her work Dægrin for the Iceland Symphony Orchestra quietly crawls under the skin. With hissing percussion that almost sounds like sandpaper, the piece is moving with constant direction. Different musical elements arise, as if objects are found and excavated from a moving, muddy ground. In a pivotal moment, the violin section slowly dies out and only what sounds like faint pulses of electricity remain in the air. The next day, Bára Gísladóttir performs on double bass alongside Magnús Jóhann Ragnarsson who plays the ondes Martenot. Together, they improvise and reveal the proximity of the string and synth instrument as the sounds stretch and fold into each other.

Another two memorable concerts for completely opposite reasons are SOLO and Caput ensemble. In the hyper-intimate concert SOLO, the audience takes their seats on the stage itself, looking out on the empty Eldborg hall and one solo performer. It feels like being in the bedroom of the soloist, one can hear every detail, and it is the intimate relationship between performer and instrument that matters. In contrast, the composition of Masaya Ozaki and「ronja」for Caput ensemble feels more like the teenager’s bedroom in which the ensemble and audience alike are caught in their own web (mess?), only to be completely destroyed as the music progresses into a full-scale noise concert.

As almost every concert is a world premiere, the audience at Dark Music Days goes in with open ears and listens with curiosity. It is rare to have such an attentive audience, perhaps stimulated by the gravity of the Harpa concert halls and such experimental music. Although the program could have been even more diverse, as the majority of concerts remained close to classical tradition, the festival never felt pretentious — the festival organisers even rescheduled two performances to make space for the Iceland-Denmark handball match, which we watched with a bunch of composers and members of the orchestra in Harpa. The overall feeling, despite the result of that game, was one of joyful discovery.

Eva Yuki Mik is a poet and performer from the Netherlands, based in Reykjavik, Iceland. For the past two years, she has been active in the grassroots music scene in Reykjavik, organising events and performing with her own music projects. She is currently doing her master’s degree in New Audiences and Innovative Practices (NAIP) at the music department of the Iceland University of the Arts.