Reykjavík Grapevine - jan. 2020, Blaðsíða 24

Music

The annual Kraumur Award
were announced in De-
cember, with 12 winners
being selected from a shortlist of 25
nominated albums. Among them were
artists that readers of The Reykjavík
Grapevine know well, like our former
cover star, the Techno-god Bjarki, for
his excellent album, Happy Earthday.
The girl punk band, Gróa also won,
as did K.óla, who also won this year's
Reykjavík Grapevine music award in
the You Should Have Heard This cat-
egory.

Larger than life musician, farmer
and a monarch Prins Póló wrote and
performed the final song for the
annual year-end Icelandic comedy
show Áramótaskaupi!) and managed
to piss people off. Well, Áramótas-
kaupi! is always controversial in a
silly way, and it appears that people
on Twitter misunderstood his joke on
global warming and lost the irony for
a moment according to the Icelandic
newspaper, Fréttabla!i!. The Prins
did nonetheless garner praise for his
sarcastic take on the issue where he
quoted an alt-right professor who
asked in a famous quote on social
media what the hell young people had
done for the future generations when
it came to global warming.

Hildur Gu!nadóttir, the composer,
and a former cover star of Reykjavík
Grapevine, won a Golden Globe award
on January 5th for her score of the
blockbuster 'Joker.' Not only that, she
is the first solo woman to win for best
score. A beatuiful and well-earned
victory for an incredible artist and a
feminist victory as well. Now we just
have to take the Oscar and bring it to
Iceland.
MUSIC
NEWS
Where Love Hides
Gy!a Valt$sdóttir releases new music video
Words: Andie Fontaine
Music Video
Available online now
GY#A’s latest release, ‘Evolution,’
has been making waves. Since be-
ing one of the founding members of
Múm, one of Iceland’s best-known
early-2000s indie bands, Gy"a
Valt$sdóttir has taken her career
in many new directions, composing
for herself or others. Most recently,
she won the 2020 Nordic Council
Music Prize, and for good reason.
Her soulful, at times ecstatic songs
transport the listener to another
dimension. Which is pretty fitting,
considering the title of her latest
video, “In Another Dimension.”.
In this video, we witness GY#A
at the beach, practising what ap-
pears to be arcane magic rituals.
This is no accident, GY#A explains.
“The song was sort of co-written
by a boy who wanted to be embodied
through me,” she tells us. “It is about
the conception of him in one of the
multiple realities, but in this one,
he just became this song.” Much of
this imagery came from a visit to
Turkey, a very personal and magi-
cal experience for the artist. “Many
times the road would split in two and
I had a choice where to go. Now I live
in the outcome of these choices. But
this song is about another outcome,
which I didn’t take. Any creation is
magic—everything we do and cre-
ate is a thought-form moved into
the physical, to me that is magic.”
Love within Evolution
Going by this and the video for 2018
single “Moonchild,” connection to
the natural world, and water in
particular, seems to be a common
thread. Is that one of the reasons
for 'Evolution' as a title of GY#A’s
album , i.e., our own evolution out
of the seas? Well, yes, as it turns
out, but there’s more to it than that.
“I didn’t even try to find a name
for this record, knowing it would
reveal itself,” GY#A says. “When it
did, loud and clear, I was quite sur-
prised. I found it unpoetic, but then
I started to see all the ways it made
sense and the beauty of the word.
Evolution comes in the first sentence
of one of the songs on the album
called ‘Moonchild.’ I find evolution so
fascinating, both morphing of mat-
ter and the evolution of conscious-
ness, as a collective and individuals.
I also like that the word Love hides in
there. So yes and no, anyone can read
what they want into it, it can have
endless meanings because it came
through me rather than from me.”
No rest
An ever-growing and ever-evolv-
ing artist such as GY#A is never
content to rest on her laurels. True
to her nature, there are still many
dreams on the horizon for her.
“What I mostly wish for right
now is a team,” she says. “I feel the
limitation of doing things so much
by myself and that it is just more fun
to work with others. I’d like to find a
manager or a partner in this business
that being a musician is. I’d like to
have creative collaborators to discuss
and execute ideas with, and I believe
that resources will come when I find
the stream for them to flow through.”
Overall, she stresses the impor-
tance of artists having the resources
they need to attain their dreams—
in this dimension or any other.
“I believe that when resourc-
es go to creative people, it will be
shared and it will grow,” she says.
“They’ll create something with it
and around that creation so many
others will be on board and ben-
efit. Creative people do not sit on
their gold because they know it has
to flow; everything has to or there
will be stagnation, constipation
and that’s the end of creativity.”
Floating, sinking
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