The Anatomy Of Frank are, as far as I can tell, a bunch of fun and friendly Americans with a thing for Iceland. In other words, exactly the sort of international band you want to see at Iceland Airwaves. At the last count they had 10 off-venue shows lined up, I rather suspect they are […]
Hymnalaya have only been around a short time, yet their debut record is already available from excellent local label recordrecords. They are yet another Icelandic band who are not easy (at least for me) to categorise or easily describe (so I asked them to do it for me below), I also like a comment on […]
The annual competition for new bands in Iceland, Músíktilraunir, has a pretty incredible track record for unearthing excellent talent (seriously, check out hte list of winners here). So it would be fairly silly to not stick with tradition of the last 5 or 6 years and have a word with the most recent winners before […]
I've only seen AMFJ (Aðalsteinn Jörundsson,) play once, and I'll definitely be trying to see him again this year. It's noisy, it's distorted, it's electonic and it's very, very real. It's kind of irresistable. I'm delighted to have had a chance to catch up with Aðalsteinn and ask a few questions ahead of Airwaves and […]
The English language Icelandic newspaper, The Reykjavík Grapevine is 10 years old this week. This is not going to be an unbiased article, I totally love that paper. Over the last ten years I have (yes, you know this) been a regular visitor to Iceland. When I think of Iceland I pretty quickly think of […]
I came across Headphones, the new album by Jóhann Kristinsson, last week when I heard about it on the same day from three different people. It was also a couple of days after I had been given some fancy new headphones – so it all made sense. I listened to it online a couple of […]
It's been a very nice year so far for Icelandic musical visitors in London. Last night was a double header in trendy, but far from home, Hoxton with Sin Fang supported by Pascal Pinon. Pascal Pinon played at 8:45, which feels like a very Pascal Pinon time of the evening. When I first saw them […]
I couldn't resist a quick jaunt to Reykjavík for the first ever Icelandic edition of the famous Sonar festival. The chance to see some of the very best stuff Icelandic music has to offer in such a short space of time was too tempting. I had never been to another festival here other than Airwaves, […]
In 2006, a few years after I had established that there was more, much more, to Icelandic music than those Sugarcubes and their singer, an album appeared called Wine For My Weakness. It's an wonderous album that I still listen to regularly, I have loved it from the first time I played it. The live […]
This list was compiled with votes from 64 voters, almost exclusively from outside of Iceland. 29 different records got some love, and still nobody nodded in the direction of Björk's remix album. Like I said last year, Iceland is truly full of wonderful music-makers and some lovely fans too. Here's our best of 2012 list […]