Iceland Airwaves Music Festival: A Brief Review

It began in an airplane hangar, with an audience of only a couple of hundred people. Now in its 12th year, Airwaves draws thousands from around the globe every October to a city-come-village by the north Atlantic Sea, in order to present the feverish best in emerging Icelandic and international music.

The ticketed festival spans 5 days and kicks off in the early evenings, but the days are also filled with 'off-venue' gigs, and this is where Airwaves differs from your typical overtly structured, queue-monopolised, wristband-flashing music festival. These artists will play anywhere and everywhere; in coffee shops, libraries, cinemas, hostels, swimming pools, and sometimes even on the street. A casual walk through the city will often be derailed as you hear new music through an open door, and suddenly find yourself hugging a brick wall alongside strangers as you watch a guitarist fingerpicking happily beneath a coat rack.

This intimacy and a total love of music is what makes Airwaves so exciting. Many people, myself included, arrive with no prior knowledge of the artists or their music - but we know we'll leave with a plethora of new obsessions under our belts. The buzz in any given crowd throughout the festival - the nodding heads, closed eyes and tapping feet - certifies the feeling that you're among like-minded people with a thirst for new, unexpected, wonderful music.

Reykjavik is a small city, which makes it easy to move from club to bar as the night goes on, and you'll find yourself spotting the same familiar faces in different crowds. If you're lucky, you'll even end up jumping around next to the very attractive lead singer of the band who just played - a vast majority of the musicians really support each other's music and choose to attend the festival themselves, rather than sitting back in their dressing rooms.

This proves the festival's stalwart defence of homegrown talent, as international bands are only permitted to perform at one Airwaves. Ever. It means the focus stays strongly on Icelandic bands and their emergence into mainstream music channels. And there sure are a lot of them. If you think Icelandic talent only stretches to Bjork and Sigur Ros, you'd better think again. As the festival grows, there are more and more Europeans and Americans in attendance, all of whom are rapidly discovering the joys of Icelandic music. Mark it in your diary for October 2012, and get ready for a musical experience like no other.

Iceland Ruminations

‘Do they have mountains in London?’ asked a girl from South Korea, as our breakfast boiled in a bubbling sulphuric hot spring. An odd question normally, but today we were standing in a cloud of natural steam on Iceland’s south coast; a country where a mountain is always in your eye line, and a double rainbow’s appearance is scarcely worth mentioning.

While many people know Iceland for its quirks -  the delicacies of fermented shark and sheep’s head, its lack of a standing army, Bjork’s wondrous hairstyles, and the location of an unpronounceable volcano whose ashy emissions caused air traffic uproar in 2010 - this little island on the Mid Atlantic Ridge also boasts a collection of the most incredible landscapes; boiling geysers, pounding waterfalls, black sand beaches and iceberg lagoons. Our volunteer group, based for two weeks in Reykjavik, had decided to visit as many of these places as we could.

Sitting in our hire cars, munching on freshly hard-boiled eggs, we headed next to Gígjökull, one of the glacial tongues now steadily melting after Eyjafjallajokull’s eruption last year. Part of the sixth largest glacier in the country, it hangs between two mountainous peaks like a draped tea towel. The sun was brilliant, the air crisp and clean, and though my fingertips and ears remained chilly, the exhilaration from scaling a glacier created more than adequate central heating. There are many tours offering hikes across the glacier, but we disregarded the need for crampons and ropes - my trusty fleece-lined Doc Martens did the job just fine as I leapt from icy peak to icy peak. Though, alas, not quite with the nimble agility I’d hoped for, as the black sandy dirt that covered these little bergs was prone to skidding. After unceremoniously falling up a particularly steep crest, I grabbed a handful of the offending stuff and discovered a pungent, ashtray-like aroma arising from it, not dissimilar to how my hair often smells after waiting at a smoky late night bus stop. This is actually volcanic ash, so fine it resembles sand grains, which still lightly covers parts of southern Iceland like blackened icing sugar.

We saw a dark space in the distance: the entrance to a cave, which had formed inside the glacier, due to the incessant melting. At first only big enough to crawl through (here my fear of small spaces immediately kicked in), the glacier soon expanded to allow us standing room in a spacious blue green cavern. A vast volume of frozen water hung above us, secured only by the sheer force of its own weight - and melting rapidly through its centre. The cavern looked more like a film set than the fleeting natural wonder it really was. 

Such is the nature of Iceland. Its form may often be transient, but the impression it leaves is firmly indelible - and every memory is normally dotted with the country’s ubiquitous sheep. The heads of which are, according to Icelanders, just as delicious as my breakfast eggs.