Icelandic Music

Iceland Airwaves 2002
Sponsored by Iceland Air and the city of Reykjavik, the Iceland Airwaves music festival was launched in 1999 as a forum to showcase budding Icelandic musical talent, such as the bands Quarashi and Sigur Ros. The 2002 Airwaves festival included international sensations Fat Boy Slim (United Kingdom), the Hives (Sweden) and Iceland's own Apparat Organ Quartet -- a band that continues to affirm why Icelandic music, with its crystalline complexity and innovation, is a window into the future of sound.

Kitchen Motors
Kitchen Motors was created in April of 1999 by three Reykyjavik-area musicians to help foster unlikely musical and artistic collaborations between local musicians, with the results performed before audiences and released on the Kitchen Motors record label. The creative think tank now covers every artistic bandwith in the creative spectrum, still instigating unlikely musical pairings but also promoting performance art events, exhibition showings, and film productions the world over. Visit their site to find out more about this quirky outfit and their upcoming projects.

The Icelandic Music Page
The Icelandic Music Page has an extensive listing of bands and musicians from Iceland, including links to their Web sites. It also provides information about Icelandic musicology and history going back hundreds of years. All genres of Icelandic music and styles are represented here, as is information about musical gear and musician unions and organizations that are active in Iceland.

BBCi's AboutMusic: Reykjavik Underground
The BBC world music series AboutMusic produced this profile of Reykjavik's music scene, interviewing the key players in the Reykjavik underground scene, across all genres. The site boasts more than 70 music clips from pioneering bands and shows the kind of cross-band collaboration that's become a hallmark of modern Icelandic music. One such musical collaboration is Kitchen Motors -- the creative crucible out of which such successful experiments as the Apparat Organ Quartet were born.

BBC Radio 3: Mixing It Visits Iceland
In October 2001, the BBC world music show Mixing It traveled to Iceland to explore the country's alternative music scene. Hear clips of music and be present at interviews with a dozen musicians from Iceland, who offer insight into why it seems that just about everyone in the country is musically inclined.

Cool Heat in Rock Lab
Since the late 1980s, with the advent of Bjork and her band, the Sugarcubes, Icelandic music has been renowned globally as a bellwether for musical experimentation and change. The persistent appeal of Icelandic bands such as Sigur Ros and Mum may reflect a desire from the general listening public to tap into sound that is, according to The Age (Oct. 8, 2002) unlike anything else. Many believe that it's Iceland's extreme landscape that has set Icelandic bands' imaginations into hyperdrive.

The Bands That Came in From the Cold
Find out why Scandinavian music is the hottest thing around, from the hard-rockin' thrash of bands like the Hives to the atmospheric bliss of Sigur Ros, a band from Iceland that performs in Hopelandic, a language it invented. An Icelandic expatriate living in San Francisco attributes the hotbed of musical experimentation to a creative reaction to six months of long nights and harsh winters. (San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 20, 2002)

Bjorkland
Born in Reykjavik on November 21, 1965, Bjork Gudmundsdottir (or Bjork, as she's commonly known) is Iceland's most famous export. This visually lush fan-site is brimming with information about the artist, from her first record release at age 11 to a slew of photos, a nicely arranged biography and inimitable musings from the "Bjorkess" herself.

Source:
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/iceland/links.html