Postcards From the Edge – Goddamn Reykjavík!

Postcards From the Edge is our cheeky little Airwaves feature where bands who are currently on tour outside of Iceland, send us short tales of where they are and of the great shows they’re playing at. they also like to indulge in tales of rock and roll excess, such as setting fire to tour buses, accidentally stabbing the drummer in the eyes with a fork, or stealing all of Chris Martin’s fair trade sandwiches from the London O2 Arena. Well, it could happen…

Our latest instalment in the series comes from a mysterious person who only refers to himself as “The Edge.” what’s even more mysterious is that the guitarist of U2 (and woolly hat fetishist) also seems to be one of the new guitarists for REYKJAVÍK! on their recent trip to Japan to play several gigs there! Tell us your story Bono, I mean The Edge

Dear readers of Grapevine’s fancy Airwaves Journal,

This postcard is sent from Japan. Actually, it was only purchased and written in Japan. It’s sort of a custom to just buy and maybe write the postcards abroad, it can be hard to get arsed to the post office when you’re in such a wonderful country.

So this postcard originates in Japan, in Kyoto to be more exact, where we were playing some TICKLING DEATH MACHINE shows with the mighty LAZYBLOOD (feat. Valdimar Jóhannsson and Erna Ómarsdóttir) at an art festival called THE KYOTO EXPERIMENT.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_VOwIVRanA

It went really well and we are planning lots and lots and lots of trips back. Japan is amazing and everyone should go there. And having like almost twenty long-haired Japanese volunteers headbanging along to our music on stage is just goddamn indescribable! What a thrill! What a thrill!

Now, pictured is most of us (I, Haukur, shot the picture and am thus behind the camera. Valdi and Bóas are missing from the shot as they were absent, but the great Lieven Dousselaire (our sound guy, who also has a pretty sweet band called Tape Tum, and Sylvain Rausa (our lighting guy, who is the best French person ever to walk the Earth) are there and they should compensate.

Also, you can’t see our drummer Kristján very well, but he’s definitely there somewhere.

We shot this photo at a Japanese hardcore bar that was called something we never found out, as the letters were in Kanji (and Kanji is super complicated). But it’s one of those tiny Japanese bars that is highly specialized and can host a maximum of seven persons at once. We were hanging in one of those gigantic Japanes bar complex things, that sort of feel like apartment buildings in Breiðholt, were they stuffed with bars), trying to enter an ‘indie bar’ called Galaxie 500 (in honour of the band — Japanese bars are very very often named after the musical artists or styles you might hear there, which is nice an transparent) when we heard some great hardcore music coming from some room. So we found it and it was awesome and they were playing Bad Brains and assorted Japanese hXc videos and it turned out the bar was entirely populated by members of a Kyoto hardcore band called Cycropsu (it means “Cyclops”) and their manager. Two were working the bar, two were drinking and one was mananging (and drinking).

So we joined them for a drink. It was amazing.

See you at Airwaves!

Love,

The Edge