Reykjavík Grapevine - 19.07.2019, Page 34

Music
West Coast
Summer Sound
Wholesome fun in a lost village at
Post-Dreifing’s Hátiðni festival
Words: Josie Gaitens Photos: Art Bicnick
Festival
Hátiðni took place in Borðeyri on
July 5th-7th
Google translate told me that the
word ‘Hátiðni’ meant ‘radio’ but
my friend shook her head when I
told her. “It’s more like noise,” she
said. “Like static.”
“Hátið” also means “festival,”
meaning “Hátiðni” is a play-on-
words and also the name of a small,
curious three-day music event
pulled together by the amorphous
group that is Post-Dreifing, an in-
dependent collective of artists and
musicians based in Reykjavík. The
festival, like everything Post-Dre-
ifing does, is DIY in nature. It took
place in Borðeyri, a good two-
hour drive away from the capital
city, which seems an interesting
choice. The tiny hamlet is barely a
village, and is part of the smallest
municipality in Iceland. There are
16 people living in the village, and
100 in the wider area.
At the very least, it’s not a bad
place to make a lot of noise.
Finding neverland
The festival was a three day affair,
running the entire weekend. Par-
ticipants, volunteers, musicians
and attendees—the line between
any of these groups was intention-
ally vague—stayed at the camp-
site or in the school building that
was also the main venue. Class-
room doors were adorned with
hand-painted signs declaring ‘No
party here, only sleeping!’ These
rooms were filled with mattresses
and often a few folk taking a siesta.
Hátiðni-goers wandered back
and forth between the school and
the campsite, filling the town with
their voices and bright clothes. Of-
ten you would find a group of them
flopped in a corner of the car park
like over-sized puppies, enjoy-
ing the sunshine.
They ran down the
lupine-filled hill,
p l a y e d f o o t b a l l
on the tiny pitch,
hung their coats
and wooly jump-
ers up in a line on
the pegs in the school’s foyer. The
whole thing felt like summer camp
meets Peter Pan’s lost boys.
Extra-curricular
The weather added to the dreamy,
surreal atmosphere. The sun beat
down ferociously, gleaming off the
sea. A yoga class took place outside
in the campsite and slowly collect-
ed participants who congregated
quietly on the warm grass. The sky
was the bluest it seemed possible
for the sky to be.
In addition to the yoga, there
were a number of other ‘fringe’
events, mostly taking place in the
old slaughterhouse. The organis-
ers had cordoned off a section of
the building and pulled in a variety
of sofas and chairs to make a cosy
communal space. This was the site
for poetry readings and the like, as
well as a well-attended presenta-
tion on the history and nature of
Post-Dreifing.
Waffles for days
The other main congregation
point was the oldest building in
the village, the Riishús, named af-
ter the rich merchant who built it
in the early 1900s. This compact
building has many functions:
museum, a store selling both sec-
ond-hand and hand-made goods,
an information point, public bath-
room and a cafe of sorts, albeit one
that only sells hot drinks and waf-
fles. During Hátiðni the benches
outside were heaped with young
adults drinking coffee, like some
incredibly hip cafe in the city had
accidentally been unceremonious-
ly dropped on a
tiny corner of
northwest Ice-
land. Inside, a
small group of
l o c a l w o m e n
beamed at their
new customers
and kept a steady stream of waf-
fles flowing. There was literally no
other food available in the village,
other than what Hátiðni was pro-
viding for volunteers and perform-
ers at the school. Just waffles.
I w a s i nterested to k now
what the waffle-making women
thought of this strange influx of
noise-makers to their normal-
ly quiet home. They told me they
were delighted. I asked one par-
ticular woman in a bright pink
sports top, with a warm, matri-
archal air, “Will you be going to
see any of the bands later?” She
laughed uproariously. “Oh, may-
be,” she grinned, with a conspir-
atorial wink. I wasn’t surprised
“The whole thing
felt like summer
camp meets Peter
Pan’s lost boys.”
34The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 12— 2019
Salóme Katrín opens the stage and steals the show at Hátiðni
gpv.is/music
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