Tag Archive Icelandic music

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Live from Reykjavik – Iceland Airwaves at Home

My first trip to Iceland was for the Iceland Airwaves Festival in 2012. It was a lifechanging experience for me for many reasons. It also seemed like a pretty kid-friendly festival, so I came home fully intending to come back another year with my family. And although I’ve made it back to Iceland many times, once with kids in tow, I’ve never managed to catch another Airwaves. During the pandemic lockdown, I realized that my oldest only has one more year of high school, which seems like a deadline for all sorts of family things. I swore to myself that the next time it’s safe to go to Airwaves, I’m taking the whole family no matter what else may be going on. A few days later I saw that Airwaves had gone online with a two-day virtual Live from Reykjavik mini-festival.

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EistnaWho?

For a few years, I was pretty obsessive about keeping a record of every band I saw perform. I tried to get at least a couple decent shots of every set at every show and festival I attended, and saved details in the metadata of my photos.

I started doing that partly to become a better writer and blogger, and partly because I was old enough to realize that I could no longer remember all the great music I saw when I was young. You know, “What was the name of that band we saw at that club that doesn’t exist anymore the time when X happened?”

But I guess I forgot the second reason and at some point decided that the documentarian approach was keeping me from fully experiencing the moment. So when I went to Eistnaflug in 2016, I didn’t take as many pictures and I didn’t take notes at all. When I got home, I didn’t spend weeks cataloging images. I just used my new energy to hop right back on the pitching treadmill.

Now I have dozens of photos of bands I can’t identify because I only saw them once at festival four years ago, half a world away when I’d probably been awake for 18 hours and seen 12 other bands that day and had beer instead of meals.

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Við erum HAM

HAM

Once upon a time, sandwiched between two bands I had come to see, the stoic Icelandic crowd suddenly went wild for a band I’d never heard of.

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Lockerbie at Airwaves 12

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Icelandic band Lockerbie looking very young at Airwaves 2012.  I loved their debut album, and this delightful video that came from it. I should see what they’ve been up to lately.