Christmas Ends And Monday Starts: The Post Performance Blues Band Give It All

We all know the feeling. The moment you read the final word of an amazing book. The second your plane touches down on your flight back home from a holiday. The lights coming on after your favourite band has left the stage. Sitting down backstage after giving the performance of your life. Suddenly one is awash in complete anticlimax and drained of every natural cognitive chemical.

“You feel like you are lying down on the ground, even if you are standing,” says Saga Sigurðardóttir of The Post Performance Blues Band. “It’s like you’re empty.”

A great fascination with this feeling is exactly what became the concept of this band, who can frequently be found performing in constantly shifting contexts, set ups, soundscapes, and visual aids.

Sensory overload

Delivering wild levels of sensory overload to the audience through highly energetic, humorous, often improvised party songs, the band has quickly infiltrated the local music scene by being skillfully adaptable and satisfying a craving for genuine fun, immediacy, and not giving a fuck.

Comprised at its core of Saga, Álfrún Helga Örnólfsdóttir, Hrefna Lind Lárusdóttir and Guðrún Heiður Ísaksdóttir, the band came together with while studying for their Masters degrees at the Iceland Academy of the Arts in 2016. “We were always sort of playing around with the idea that we’re a band,” says Álfrún. “The concept of the band began without us playing or making any music. We were just fantasising about what kind of a band we would be.”

Dying shitballs

The quartet was suddenly thrown into the deep end while participating in the Cycle Arts & Music Festival at Gerðarsafn in 2016, where they met the English art collective Boyle & Shaw.

“It’s this whole thing of just going for it and not deciding what you’re supposed to be allowed to do.”

“We really liked each other’s energy,” Álfrún explains., “Their art installation had a PA system and a mike and one day they said, ‘Do you wanna just play around?’ We started singing and making some harmonies and music about a dying species called Shitballs.”

“That’s what clicked between us because they were fascinated with the end of this species and we were fascinated with the end and anticlimax of performance,” Saga continues. These two senses of ending led to the beautiful beginning of their band, however, which has now performed everywhere from Gaukurinn to the Independent Church. “We always had a rule to never say no to a gig,” says Álfrún. “Like, yeah that’s what’s gonna happen!”

Post performance blues

This sense of play and improvisation and taking each opportunity seems to be the true driving force of their energy, leading them to finish one gig and spontaneously walk into a pub in a small town in the Åland Islands—in full “rock star costumes”—demand to speak to the owner, and get another gig the following night.

“It’s this whole thing of just going for it and not deciding what you’re supposed to be allowed to do,” says Saga. “But it took me a week to get out of the post performance blues after that. It was a four day trip. It was five days of bluesing.”

Info: Find information on upcoming gigs at facebook.com/theppbb