Reykjavík Grapevine - jan 2022, Qupperneq 10

10 The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 01— 2022
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“The name is kind of just, nonsense,” say’s Krummi Uggason,
one of the founders of the grassroots punk band, Sucks to be
you, Nigel. The Reykjavík Grapevine Music Awards panel chose
the band as one of two artists to watch this year. In some ways,
an unorthodox selection for the panel, since the band is not
even a year old and hails from a small underground scene.
But they have used their time in an incredibly efficient way,
publishing their first album, 'Tína Blóm', earlier this year. The
album is humorous raw punk, with titles like, ‘Is It Un-PC To
Cut Children In Two?’. The answer is “yes,” if you’re wonder-
ing. It’s also highly illegal, in case you’re still unsure.
Putting their music to the side for the moment, our first
question upon meeting with the band is simple: Who the hell
is Nigel? Are you talking about Nigel Farage?
“A lot of people have asked us about that,” Krummi answers
and his bandmates chuckle. “Me and Vigfús [!ór Eiríksson]
were driving, and this was a running joke, like saying, it sucks
to be….whatever. All of a sudden, we saw this number plate,
and the name appeared to us in traffic: It sucks to be you,
Nigel.”
The band is young. Krummi and Vigfús started it and found
some band mates in the COVID-summer of 2020. But this is
punk, and stuff moves fast, so they lost some members and
gained some others. But it wasn’t until they found Silja Rún
Högnadóttir that everything came together.
So you’re the singer, I ask? “Well, I consider myself more
of a screamer than a singer,” she explains. And what a power-
ful screamer she is. She is a long time friend of Krummi and
Vigfús, but it took time for them to realise that she was the
perfect fit for this odd band.
“We asked her if she was up for singing for us after the
former singer quit,” says Vigfús. “I told them that I couldn’t
really sing,” Silja explains. But they answered, in true punk
DIY style: 'Well, it doesn’t really matter!'”
Asked how they managed to record an album in such a
short time, they say that it’s more or less thanks to their good
friend Hlynur Sævarsson, a member of Icelandic indie band
Trailer Todd.
Asked about the future, Silja says that they don’t want to
take themselves too seriously. “We’re just playing and having
fun ourselves. We love to play concerts,” she says. “It’s liberat-
ing.” VG
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Every year, the Grapevine Music Awards give a shout out to
someone who has made the musical world a better place over
the preceding 12 months. But for 2022, we’re highlighting a
project that set out to make the actual world a better place
too.
So we doff our caps to Minningar, a collective that evolved
around musicians Daniele Girolamo and Eyrún Engilberts-
dóttir, who met while studying music in Reykjavík. They
decided to create a project to document the tragic beauty of
Icelandic glaciers as they disappear due to human indiffer-
ence, which led to the magnificent album 'From the Ocean/
To the Ocean (Memories of Snæfellsjökull)'.
After teaming up with Eyrún, Daniele had a chance
encounter with location sound recording expert Magnus
Bergsson—a man renowned for his work capturing the
audio of natural environments. “I asked him one night if we
could create some musical art from what he was doing,” says
Daniele, “and he agreed”. Daniele then asked musical synthe-
sis innovator Úlfur Hansson to complete the project team
“because I love his music, and he’s an amazing composer and
musician.”
The quartet decided to focus on Snæfellsjökull glacier in
West Iceland. They named themselves Minningar—which
means “memories”—to reflect their mission to create an
audio document of what may soon be gone.
Weekends spent recording in the field yielded hours of
pristine natural sounds; wind, water and shifting ice all
contributing to the rich soundscapes captured by Magnus.
Many of those recordings were earmarked to appear on the
album in their raw form. Others acted as guiding scores for
the three musicians when they later laid down studio tracks
to accompany the natural sounds. The rule was that the music
should never eclipse the sounds of nature. “The subject is the
field recording,” says Daniele, clarifying the priorities in that
creative process. “Our music is like a frame.”
A cave on the glacier also offered the chance to record
music on location in a unique acoustic, which Daniele wasn’t
able to resist. “I was thinking of bringing the cello that day,
but we had so much stuff for recording,” Daniele recalls. So
instead he took a kalimba, (a small thumb-piano), as a more
portable alternative, and created a track for the album.
'From the Ocean/To the Ocean (Memories of Snæfell-
sjökull)' is a sonically striking work; evocative of the wild
expanses at its source, and poignant in the message that it
carries. Its powerful effect isn’t lost on Eyrún. “The whole
project has been very eye opening for me, sonically and just
showing a new way to play,” she says. “It's very different to
the other projects that I've been working on.”
The experience—along with the audience reaction to
the album, and their live performance of it—has inspired
Minningar to continue their work. Recordings are currently
taking place on Sólheimajökull glacier for a second album
due later this year. JP
Honourable mentions: Cell7, Inspector Spacetime,
Ólafur Arnalds, DJ Sley og Jamesendir, Pósthúsi!