From Iceland — Straumur On Festivals: Believe The Hype

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First things first: Sónar Reykjavík at Harpa was a gigantic audiovisual explosion in dolby digital and HD vivid colors. For a three-day weekend, Harpa transformed into humongous club on an Ibiza scale. The music spanned the range from ambient to EDM and dubstep to disco. Todd Terje turned Silfurberg into a space station discotheque with his bouncy sci-fi disco, and Icelandic electro legends Súrefni presented a psychedelic techno hybrid with lots of rawk freakouts. Kindness ran the whitest funky boy alive discoton and Skrillex bombarded our senses from every possible angle. One of the best things about the festival is its size and the flow. There are five stages, all of them within a single venue, and there are no queues, so you can just wander between acts in no time at will without having to venture out and face the bastardly February climate. Sónar Reykjavík just keeps getting better–we’re already looking forward for the next installment.

Just as one festival ends, we get big news about the next one. On Tuesday, we learned that hip hop revolutionaries, the self-proclaimed “black CNN,” Public Enemy, will be taking the stage at All Tomorrow’s Parties in Ásbrú on July 2-4. Those guys are the atomic bomb, and we’re pretty sure Flavor Flav can still tell us what time it is, even after all those years of indulgent crack smoking. Also added to the bill were experimental no-wave group Swans (maybe they’ll make it over this time?), noise rock duo Lightning Bolt, Bardo Pond, Grísalappalísa, Valdimar, StafrÒnn Hákon, Oyama, Mr. Silla and Kippi Kaninus. All this on top of previously announced acts like Belle And Sebastian, Iggy Pop, Run The Jewels and Godspeed You! Black Emperor–we clearly have a a diverse musical buffet of epic proportions in store.

Finally, check this out: Hörður Már Bjarnason, aka M-Band, just dropped a new video for one of last year’s best Icelandic tracks, the haunting “Ever Ending Never” from his debut LP ‘Haust’. In the video, Hörður floats around a purple visualizer that is connected to the repetitive bouncing synth line. Warning: this video will hypnotize you.