Reykjavík Grapevine - 07.10.2016, Page 36

We move quickly. Rúnar is behind
schedule picking up Haukur and
Siggi. There’s no time to get beers.
We swoop Haukur’s music from
his house, swing by Siggi’s house
in Hlíðar, and pull into the park-
ing lot of FM Xtra just as the hosts
of the previous radio show drive
off. Charging in, Haukur hooks
his MacBook into a stand, Rúnar
runs his fingers through wisps of
cords, and Siggi slides in behind a
microphone. They pace and plug
and talk and then: a beat. A song by
Exos comes on through the room’s
speakers, and the three bodies are
still for ten seconds while Siggi goes
on the mic and addresses his radio
audience: “yo.” Then the Exos beat
comes back into the room, and the
pacing and the chatter begin where
they left off.
On air Rúnar is known as Nær-
vera, Haukur as Tandri, and Siggi
as Skurður. The three are part of an
eleven-member DJ collective called
Plútó. Born out of the remnants of
the legendary drum and bass club
night breakbeat.is, along with
the Fótafimi (juke/footwork) and
Lagtiðni (bass, grime) DJ groups,
the minds behind Plútó comprise
the most comprehensive knowl-
edge tank of dance and electronic
music in Iceland. “We’re like an art
collective, without the pretentious-
ness,” Rúnar explains. No artist’s
statement.
Every Saturday from 19:00-
21:00, Plútó hosts a radio show by
the same name on FM Xtra. Their
studio, lodged in the somewhere-
streets of Garðarbær, pulses with
fluorescent green lights and has a
massive Beck’s logo smeared across
the back wall. There is comfortable
seating and plenty of Beck’s to go
around. It is clear from the second
we enter, though, that the beer is
not for drinking, and the couch is
not for sitting.
“I get bored easily with popular
music,” Rúnar says, pacing and
nodding to Tandri’s pulse. “Tech-
no is kind of a ‘last stop’ for me
in a way. I was always looking for
something more intense, for the
bigger party (but not in the like
EDM sense of party). I just love to
move.” It’s obvious. He hasn’t sat
down since we got there nearly
an hour ago. “I love to go down-
town and dance. Ninety percent
of us here are professionals at go-
ing downtown for the past billion
years.”
The continuity
of change
What keeps Rúnar interested in
this genre is that the music itself
is so open to evolution, while re-
maining rooted. “In my sets I can
play something from 1994 right be-
fore something that was released
last month. It’s completely open
to evolution—Mortiz von Oswald
pretty much invented two entire
subgenres by himself—but it stays
stable at the same time.”
Rúnar, like everyone else in-
volved in the show, is a regular
presence as a DJ downtown, but
behind the guise of the radio show
“we can really play whatever the
fuck we want,” he says eagerly. “I
like difficult music. When I play a
gig, I have to decide whether I will
play house that’s easy for people to
dance to, or if I will play what I am
really excited about. When I start-
ed DJing I was okay playing Jus-
tice and Daft Punk and the things
I thought the crowd wanted, but I
realised that takes more energy.
It’s better for everyone involved if
I play what is really interesting to
me. That way, too, I know that ev-
eryone who is there dancing really
wants to be there dancing.”
It’s hard to get gigs a lot of the
time, Rúnar says, but that’s inher-
ent to being ahead of the curve. On
the radio show they are free from
the confines of crowd (dis)approval
and booking another gig. They are
free to push the envelope. Doing so
is what this show has built its repu-
tation on.
“We were really the first to play
a lot of genres and sub-genres: hip-
hop, dubstep, grime… Siggi has
one of the largest inventories of
grime in Iceland,” Rúnar assures
me. “Siggi, when did you start play-
ing grime?” he asks. “When grime
started,” Siggi answers.
Nærvera, Tandri, and Skurður
churn out two hours of techno like
a well-oiled machine. They rotate
around the studio, bob to each oth-
er’s sets, chat, laugh, smoke, dance.
And just like the music that they
love, they never really sit still.
LISTEN AND SHARE:
gpv.is/pluto
Music Radio
Higher
Fre-quen-
cies
In the studio
with Plútó
Words PARKER YAMASAKI
Photos ART BICNICK &
PARKER YAMASAKI
36The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 16 — 2016