Or: how far we walked to meet the band and the fish.

This week kicked off with some small disappointments. The only interview we had confirmed was postponed, and many of the bands we had contacted have not yet responded to our mails/texts/calls yet. So, to max out our tourist cards we decided to give some museums a go, and in true Sonic-Iceland-walking-style headed off to the 871 +/-2 archeology-exhibition, walked around the harbour to the maritime museum and finally settled for a coffee in Cafe Paris on sunny Austurvöllur-square.

By the way: just walking around downtown we passed by new mayor Jón Gnarr and Georg Hólm of Sigur Rós, and probably another cohort of musicians and artists that we did not recognise (yet).

As, after returning to headquarters, no further interview-confirmations had trickled in, we set for another walk around the university and towards the sea, which the tourist map of Reykjavik confirms as “very romantic”.

Not that you get the wrong impression about the relationship in Sonic Iceland, but at that stage we were pretty bored and needed something to do, and drinking beer seemed not to be the appropriate thing at the time. The part of our neighbourhood Vesturbær near the ocean is… pretty, but does resemble your typical, orderly neighbourhood with elderly ladies taking their dog for a walk while their husbands water the lawn, so the two tourists from Germany and Ireland felt a bit displaced. At least Kai could take some pictures.

The area we walked through when returning to the city (around the Radisson Saga Hotel) even resembled socialist Germany pre-reunion. Cheery buildings made of precast concrete slabs, a lonely petrol station and no glacier or volcano to be seen anywhere.

Reykjavik!

While sitting at dinner downtown later, we finally reached Haukur from Reykavik!, one of the bands on top of our list. Due to some misunderstandings on the phone we started walking to the rehearsal space of the band, only to find ourselves in a seemingly deserted part of the harbour, surrounded by closed supermarkets and storage depots.

After some inaccurate walking we finally heard the typical, muffled sound of drums and had reached our destination: a rehearsal space-building right at the water, where over 20 Icelandic Bands rehearse, as we found out. It seems we will return here..

The five friendly guys from Reykjavik! then gave us a quick tour of “their” part of the building and we then settled for a chat in the parking lot*. Some of the things the guys said again changed my viewpoint of Iceland (and the “culture”-part of its society), and we pretty much established that our mission here in Iceland is to go “under the elf”, as guitarist/vocalist (and Reykjavik Grapevine-editor) Haukur puts it. The answer to what makes this place and its music so special is way more multilayered and complex than I had expected before. It does sound like the title for a porn movie, though.

Kai then snapped some pictures of the band posing with a dead fish – a prop that is traditionally always lying around somewhere in Iceland.

After listening to two pumping and extremely tight songs (drummer Kristján is an animal, even though he does not look the part), we thanked the guys and walked back to town to reward ourselves with a quick pint in Kaffibarinn. Seems we will end here more often then expected.

* All interviews will be published in their entirety with the launch of our finished website.