I recently was in a conversation with a woman whose husband was in a career transition. He wasn’t making the effort to get his new business started that she expected when she okayed the decision to quit his day job, and she was getting really frustrated. I joked, “Yeah, you married an artist not a drummer!”
“He does play drums!” she wailed.
Oops.
So maybe there is a basis to the drummer stereotypes. Certainly a good drummer is hard to find. I interviewed a lot of Airwaves acts in 2012 on my first trip to Iceland. The search for a good drummer was a common theme in those interviews. One person said that for all the musicians in Iceland, there were only about 30 really good drummers. This is one of them.
Raggi Sverrisson is one of the best drummers I’ve ever heard. A former bandmate claims he can sustain 240 beats per minute with metronomic accuracy and anyone who listens to his bands play can hear the difference a really consistent drummer makes. I think I saw him perform with four different bands at Eistnaflug 2014. I really liked Azoic and Ophidian I, but Beneath is the band I’ve listened to the most. The internet tells me Raggi is no longer with Beneath, and that’s a crying shame, because a good drummer is hard to find.
