Iceland Airwaves Festival – Reykjavik

There’s an old Icelandic saying that goes “Everything is hay in hard times”. We didn’t know that until a billboard advertising the former Danish colony’s biggest bank — those reliable dispensers of folk wisdom in the postmodern era — told us as much, at customs on the way into Keflavik Airport.

‘That’s nice’, we think to ourselves, detecting in the advert a cosy echo of the in-this-together rhetoric that’s been a staple of David Cameron’s attempts to preach austerity to a British public increasingly miffed that this bad recession business hadn’t blown over some months ago.

But the truth is in Iceland, they’re emphatically not all in this together. The bank in question, Landsbanki, racked up enormous debts when its Icesave branch defaulted after finding itself unable to refinance short-term loans, leaving foreign investors out of pocket and the UK government stepping in to cover the shortfall for customers at home.

Now the country’s being held to ransom over the cash — and the country has politely declined to cough up, to the massive annoyance of governments and bankers alike. In refusing to play peep-show janitors to the banking system’s cash-spunking bullies, Iceland’s setting a fascinating precedent to countries resigned to their mop and bucket, at least until the Occupy Protests started springing up in the wake of the march on Wall Street.

One person keen to seize upon the potential of the political moment has been Björk, whose Biophilia album comes billed as an entirely new kind of protest record and has had critics all of a lather of late. Bringing the album’s live counterpart to her hometown at the Airwaves Festival in Reykjavik, her enthusiasm proves to be catching.

Broadly speaking, the Biophilia project seeks to establish a comprehensive picture of man and his place in the environment, using that as a platform for re-examining the way the western world lives in the 21^st century. If that sounds a little woolly, it’s worth remembering that Björk’s plea for a more sustainable way of living has real economic grounding, since Iceland’s potential for existing outside of the global economic system is actually pretty big — geothermal and hydropower provides for around 80% of the country’s energy requirements, and its fishing industry is one of the biggest worldwide.

In addition to all that, Iceland is also home to rapidly expanding software and biotechnology industries, which accounts for some of the technocratic streak in Biophilia’s utopian bent: “we’re on the brink of a technological revolution that will reunite us with planet earth,” learned Beeb fossil David Attenborough informs us at the show’s beginning, and a few titters break out among the audience.

As for the show itself (performed in the city’s astonishing seafront Harpa building), it’s beautiful — a choir of Icelandic girls clad in blue and gold alternatively swaying and moshing as Björk tippy-toes around the stage, making her always-singular voice soar and dip through long and often quite difficult passages of music. There are giant bolts of electricity, perpetual motion machines and gorgeous, sometimes-disturbing images on a bank of television screens (one bit depicting marine life crawling through a dead seal’s eye socket is particularly choice).

The songs, meanwhile, are quite spectacularly weird — love songs in the fullest sense of the term, filled with light and wonder at the world. On the tinkling, lullaby-ish ‘Virus’’ Björk compares her ardour to “a mushroom on a tree trunk as the protein transmutates / I knock on your skin and I am in”, and the slow-building ‘Mutual Core’ even wears comically informative lyrics like “as fast as your fingernail grows, the Atlantic ridge drifts to counteract distance — you know I gave it all” surprisingly well.

At the encore we’re given a fiery rendition of Volta standout ‘Declare Independence’, a righteous moment that’ll have any lurking UK dignitaries in the audience muttering darkly to themselves, but which sets the rest of us reeling giddily into the night: “declare independence, don’t let them do that to you!! Make your own flag!”

Buffeted back from the harbour by spitty gusts of freezing-cold wind, we’re left to reflect on a fine weekend’s music. On Thursday there was Beach House, whose languid lo-fi stylings were given a mature and deeply sexy makeover on last year’s Teen Dream. Star of the show is Victoria Legrand’s acres-deep voice, which gives the band a gravitas well in excess of their shoegaze peers, and which finds beautiful support in the shape of Alex Scally’s increasingly bold, snug-fitting guitar lines.

After that it’s Yoko Ono and her band of unknowns (plus Sean Lennon) wearing ‘Imagine Peace’ T-shirts, who deliver a fine set of avant-rock schizophrenia before Tune-yards’ Merrill Garbus is wheeled out for a duet at the death. “She’s great, isn’t she?” giggles Yoko. “Yeah she is, but you’re rubbish!” shouts an audience member back at the former Fluxus artist, WWII survivor and hugely influential musician. Right on, dickhead!

On Friday we stroll through Reykjavik’s downtown streets, past knitwear boutiques, sundry fish restaurants and tourist tat shops making humorous reference to the recession: “don’t fuck with Iceland: we may not have cash, but we have plenty of ash”, etc. Later in the evening and there’s a scary-looking crush at the entrance to the Nasa venue, which is playing host to the best line-up the festival has to offer this weekend. After a few phone calls and much confusion we’re ushered in the back door to the bands’ dressing room (ooh, get us!), where the aforementioned Merrill Garbus can be seen applying her lippy.

Out front and we catch Niki & The Dove finishing up their set — frontwoman Malin Dahlström is a winged goddess of quirk pop-in-waiting, and the Swedish duo’s best songs are possessed of a melodic genius that pulls them up just the right side of cheesy. Clock Opera’s clever-clever indie pop sparks occasionally but flatters to deceive a bit, and Tune-yards elicit perhaps the best response of the weekend, floorboards shaking under the weight of songs as great and soaringly strange as ‘Powa’ and ‘Bizness’.

Saturday brought more electro-pop goodness from Canadian troupe Austra, whose debut Feel It Break suggested Erasure if they harboured dark literary aspirations instead of a knack for cheesy Europop hooks. Singer/project brainchild Katie Stelmanis brings balletic grace to the songs (admittedly of variable quality), lifting her voice in quick, precise flights that send a shiver through the spine.

Copenhagen scamps Iceage fail to reproduce the nuanced evil of their debut New Brigade over at the Gaukur á Stöng venue, but what the hell: everything is hay in hard times, as they say here in Iceland.

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