Reykjavík Grapevine - 01.07.2016, Síða 32

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32The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 9 — 2016Music
A lot of interesting music came out in
2015. Some got more attention while
other music fell between the cracks—
such is life. Still, those who weren’t no-
ticed might rejoice in the hope that one
day, their music will be “rediscovered,”
much like a lot of old Icelandic pop and
rock music which has been re-issued by
foreign labels with dusty fingers.
Millennials like myself haven’t heard
about these old bands in general and
if we ask our parents about their mu-
sic, we usually get a baffled look, like:
“Where the hell did you hear that?”
So, to celebrate good music, let’s
look at a few Icelandic bands & musi-
cians who were somewhat more over-
looked than their peers—at least for
my generation.
SIGRÚN
HARÐARDÓTTIR
Sigrún Harðardóttir was a well-known
young singer when her album ‘Shadow
Lady’ came out in 1976. It was the first
album entirely composed by a woman
in Iceland and it got a four-star review
in the newspaper Tíminn. “Sigrún’s
album is the best album by an Icelan-
dic woman, ever. Although the albums
that female singers in Iceland have re-
leased before are not very good, ‘Shad-
ow Lady’ is easily far better.” Sounds
like a bit of a harsh thing to say about
female solo artists at the time, but
importantly this was the first female
singer/songwriter in Icelandic pop
history. Some of the biggest heavy-
weights in the rock scene at the time
sang and played on the album as back-
ing vocalists and accompanists.
The album hasn’t been talked about
much in recent years, except in 2012
when the business paper Viðskip-
tablaðið reported that an original vi-
nyl copy of the album was the most
expensive Icelandic album on eBay: 375
GBP, or about 77,000 Icelandic krónur.
Check out: “Shadow Lady”
TAUGADEILDIN
Taugadeildin (“The Nerve Ward”) was
a post-punk band that operated be-
tween 1980 and 1981. They released
one self-titled 7” and all the songs are
amazing, top notch synth-punk. The
singer, Óskar Þórisson, had worked
with Fræbbblarnir, one of the biggest
Icelndic punk bands, in the spring of
1979; bassist Árni Daníel Júlíusson had
been the singer of Snillingarnir. Ac-
cording to Wikipedia, “for a period the
band used the drum machine Eliza-
beth I, which was later laid aside." The
band dissolved around the same time
as their debut came out.
Óskar later joined the awesome
punk band Q4U, while Árni started
Mogo Homo, a more experimental out-
fit. Fatefully, the reason why Tauga-
deildin is not present in the classic
documentary 1982 documentary ‘Rokk
í Reykjavík’ is because they broke up
in the autumn, of 1981, just before the
film was shot that winter.
Check out: “Hvítar grafir (White Graves)”
MAGNÚS BLÖNDAL
Magnús Blöndal was an Icelandic com-
poser, conductor and pianist born in
1925. He was at the forefront of the
Icelandic avant-garde in the 1950s
and early 60s. He was also a pioneer
of electronic music, creating musique
concrète works on a one-channel tape
recorder that captured the attention
of electronic pioneer Karlheinz Stock-
hausen, who played his stuff on his ra-
Thee Lost &
Found Section
by LORD PUSSWHIP
Photo by MAGNÚS ANDERSEN