Reykjavík Grapevine - 05.11.2010, Side 14

The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 17 — 2010
14
Airwaves | After The Fact
Orphic Oxtra Made Me
Want To Be young
Valgerður Þóroddsdóttir
I don’t know what it was exactly; perhaps
it had been a long four days—a long 30
concerts over the weekend—but when I
entered NASA on Sunday night I found
the walls were crumbling. Coming from
the stage, the most exultant, raptur-
ous sounds—individual notes racing
up and down stairs, together scaling
mountains. Tuba! Horns! Trombone!
Bassoon! Galore! Orphic Oxtra is youth
distilled by wind instruments. I don’t
mean to sound fanatic, (and yes, I’m only
21-years-young), but they made me long
to be young again—with a trumpet in
one hand and my heart in the other. The
kind of feeling, the kind of show, that we
all wish would last a lifetime
The dandelion Seeds
Created A Sonic Explosion
Anna Margrét Björnsson
Kaffistofan was the ultimate place to be
on Airwaves Saturday night. This venue
was so underground it even failed to make
the Airwaves off-venue schedule. The
crowd counted perhaps a total of twenty
people (most of them moonshine-drink-
ing teenagers). I just managed to catch
The Dandelion Seeds, a band previously
called Kid Twist. Their new name draws
from the song Dandelion Seeds by July, a
British cult psych band, obviously a heavy
inspiration. When the five fresh-faced
youngsters came on stage something
quite magical happened. These British
invasion styled feedback rockers created
an amazing and all-encompassing wall of
noise with sixties psych-patterned videos
overlaid on sixties soft porn and go-go
dancing projecting in the background.
The gallery space turned out to be a mag-
nificent venue, with plenty of space for
the musicians and plenty of walls for the
sound to resonate from. The Dandelion
Seeds do seem to live in their own little
world of sixties psychedelia but at least
they're doing something completely dif-
ferent from anyone else playing Airwaves
this year. They managed to create a stun-
ning show and a sonic explosion that will
be hard to forget.
Náttfari Made My Gut Shake
– Hell yeah!
Wiebke Wolter
The show I enjoyed most at this year's
Airwaves was more like an anti-show:
Náttfari did everything right. No em-
barrassing addressing the audience in
between songs, for instance. The band
didn't really do a 'show', they just played
their songs for the audience—or let's say
for me and a few other people standing
around. And that was the only flaw of
this concert: the lack of people witness-
ing the gut-shaking Náttfari experience.
The guitar sounded like a guitar should
sound: just a little bit of distortion, no de-
lay, yeah. Some slide guitar and some old
strings squeaking along ones attached to
the guitar added a psychedelic feel to the
post rock-y sound. Melodic bass playing
and exciting drumming completed the
sound that felt more like the American
South than 101 Reykjavík.
Shows I also really liked were Óla-
fur Arnalds' Gesamtkunstwerk-perfor-
mance, the playful French electro combo
Gablé and similarly energetic LCMDF
from Finland, the unpretentiously soul-
ful Angel Deradoorian and the vibrant
rockabilly combo 59's.
Gone postal Were The Bomb
Florian Zühlke
I saw some very good shows this year, in-
cluding XXX Rottweiler, Jungle Fiction,
Svavar Knútur, Of Monsters and Men,
Prinspóló and Swords Of Chaos. There
wasn't the particular 'one show' that I
Morgan Levy, photographer
Perhaps what made Diamond Rings so captivating to watch and photograph was the incongruity between his soft, angelic
face and his unexpectedly low, disaffected voice. His effeminately feathered eye shadow clashed perfectly with distinct
masculine vocals reminiscent of Stephen Merritt. The disconnect between sight and sound and the blurriness of gender
lines added a delightful element of absurdity to his performance. I couldn't resist over-stating the sweetness of his face by
creating a halo around his head with the beams of white stage light. Nor could I hold back laughter when—twenty seconds
into his first song—he encountered technical difficulties and dryly asked if any pictures were taken so that at least someone
could blog about his performance.
The Best Show I Witnessed At
Iceland Airwaves 2010, And Why It Was
The Best Show I Witessed At Iceland
Airwaves 2010
By The Grapevine Airwaves Review Team
So we did it again. We compiled a team of music lovers-slash-
misanthropes to review every single
show of the official Iceland Airwaves
programme. Every last musician that
played the festival in an official ca-
pacity can head to grapevine.is/
airwaves and read what a particular
person at a particular point of time,
bearing a particular mindset, has to
say about his or her particular per-
formance at that particular festival.
"Why would you do this?" you ask.
"does anyone really need to read
reviews of every single show at Air-
waves?" you continue.
Well. We did this mostly because we
could. We've done it in years past (in
print form from 2005-2008, on-line last
year and this year), and it's always been
a fun part of the festival, whether you're
playing there or just attending for fun.
You get to re-live your previous evening
via the words of some writer who docu-
mented the venue that entire night (and
through the lens of that photographer
who was always hogging the best spots,
getting in your way). And you maybe
don’t agree with the writer’s assessment,
and you may not be familiar with the
photographer’s angle, but they still serve
as starting points for some sort of con-
versation, whether it be with yourself or
your friends or maybe the letters/com-
ments section of the Grapevine. And we
are big fans of inciting conversation, of
fanning the f lames of discourse.
And discourse doesn’t always have
to be about super important life or death
political stuff. It can also be about dumb,
fun stuff. Like music.
Now, if you played one of the shows
in question, the reviews can also be
pretty useful. You get some guy or girl
putting thought and words into describ-
ing your performance. You had someone
sitting at four in the morning, drinking
their umpteenth cup of coffee, trying to
think of that one adjective that describes
better than any other what you do, or
what you did, or what you were trying to
do.
Putting some effort in describing
what went down, and how it appeared to
him or her that given night.
And that can serve as a gateway for
some great discourse within your band,
or for your band. If nothing else, it will
ensure a record of your being there at
that particular place and moment in
time exists, and will be accessible to fu-
ture music lovers and archaeologists. Or
at least until our hard drives break down.
Imagine how stunning it will be for
THE FUTURE’s teenagers all the way
over in 2094 to read about Panoramix’s
performance at Jacobsen on Airwaves
Thursday 2009.
And if you disagree with a given as-
sessment of your night, that’s fair, fine
and to be expected. There is no final
word on music and there can be no clos-
ing verdict. There should be conversa-
tion about it and discourse and disagree-
ment and everyone making it – as well as
everyone writing about it and listening
to it – should strive at bettering them-
selves at all times.
I’ve been attending this festival for
a bunch of years now. I’m getting old.
This time around, I wasn’t able to take in
as many performances as I would have
liked. There was a lot of work to be done,
running around, editing stuff and play-
ing the occasional show.
But I did catch some shows, and I
liked what I saw for the most part. I liked
the spirit, the energy, enthusiasm and
professionalism of every single outfit I
saw displayed. And the very evident pas-
sion. This held true whether they were
playing for an empty Faktorý, a book-
store off-venue or to a packed, throbbing
NASA. They all loved it.
They loved it as much as they seem
to love every single show I see them play,
and playing music in general. This is
why I very strongly believe in the musi-
cians that make up the Icelandic scene at
t he moment, and it is why I believe that
they all have a great future. Loving what
you do is the key to doing lovely things.
Yeah.
Another thing that impressed me
greatly, what I’ve come to hold as one
of the principal reasons Airwaves often
surpasses similar festivals of its calibre
(and that’s not empty boasting – I’ve
been around) is the amount of work the
audience is willing to put into it. A band
might only have four officially released
tracks to their name and they still get to
perform to a crowded venue brimming
with folks that are singing along to their
stuff. You had people queuing up for ex-
perimental ambient-noise shows. Cou-
ples slow-dancing to obscure DJs or even
more obscure acoustic duos. Festivalgo-
ers seem eager to embrace and celebrate
a lot of unheard music over the course of
five days.
That’s dedication.
Now, read on for our reviewers' fa-
vourite performances, and our photog-
raphers' favourite images from Iceland
Airwaves 2010 ...
HSM
THANK yOU FOR THE MUSIC
Our super team of music lovers pick their favourites of Iceland Airwaves 2010
Read all the reviews (and lotsa bonus stuff - including a list of things our writers
did NOT like at the festival) at www.grapevine.is/airwaves