It’s Monday, so we take it slow here on our sonic island. To ease you into the week, here are two videos from last week’s Iceland Inspires concert. The first one features our friends of For A Minor Reflection, performing their new song “Dansi Dans”:

For a minor reflection from Inspired By Iceland on Vimeo.

And the second one contains the “Irish link” to Iceland I’ve been looking for, to be more precise it contains Glen Hansard and Damien Rice, backed up by a band consisting of such illustrous Icelandic musicians as Helgi Jonsson, Lay Low and Lára Rúnarsdóttir. Enjoy.

Glen Hansard from Inspired By Iceland on Vimeo.

Have a nice week.

As we are currently searching for ways to fund SONIC ICELAND (and we are on the way!), we thought it to be a good idea to talk a bit more about platforms and initiatives that help creative people and especially musicians to gather funds for an album/video/project. One of these initiatives is Pledge Music:

Pledge Music provides fans and artists the opportunity to work together to make new records and raise money for charity. By combining new social networking technology, old school music biz know how and an irresistible menu of exclusive incentives, fans can visit the site to hear great new music, enjoy and share unique experiences with the artists they love and actively participate in the release process

What Pledge does is to allow artists to create a pledge (i.e. the actual amount needed for the recording project) and have fans participate – you can buy CD’s, hand-written greeting cards and more fun things to support your artist as a fan, depending on what the artist if offering. The fan however is only fully charged when the pledge target is reached. Pledge Music finances itself by a 15% commission once the target is reached, and offer full support in form of MySpace/Facebook apps etc. A very neat idea.

One of the bands currently collecting via Pledge is For a Minor Reflection. We have already featured the four boys from Reykjavík on our Facebook and Twitter-profiles a couple of times, but think their instrumental sounds and musical landscapes to be so extraordinary and fascinating that we don’t stop at that – so please give them your support, if you like them a bit. We do.

By the way: they are on tour in Germany in May.

Kjartan Holm introduces For a Minor Reflection from For a Minor Reflection on Vimeo.

For a Minor Reflection – Ókyrrð from Kvikmyndaskóli Íslands on Vimeo.