Björk, an Eclipse, and 40 Years of Icelandic Underground Music

The topic was the local music scene, of course, and how it’s changed in the decades that the label has existed. For an hour, I listened to the three friends trade stories about the earlier days, describing periods of time as the bands they were playing with instead of actual years.

Smekkleysa was born as a fledgling incubator, giving experimental musicians a space to, well, explore. “It was very DIY, you know,” Siggi told me. “We ended up coming together with this group—the musician side and the writer side—to form an umbrella organization, which was supposed to bring together different strands of the Reykjavik counterculture at the time.”

Right then, a young woman floated by, all smiles, and gave Siggi a hug as she greeted the others at the table. It was Björk’s daughter, Ísadóra Bjarkardóttir Barney, who was helping bring Echolalia together.

This is an island of friends-turned-family, after all. And while 40 years may have passed, this crew agreed that the Icelandic music community still had its edge. “There are new generations coming up that are doing things on their own terms and with their own tools,” Siggi said. “The tools change, but the sentiment doesn’t change very much.” Part of the reason? The lack of a big music business on the island, especially when compared to the rest of Europe. “This is a rather sort of closed-off community—but we still have a huge number of artists from Iceland that are internationally known,” Siggi added.

Iceland’s close-knit creative community has something that’s shaped my own experience here after 22 visits, and is one of the main reasons why I continue to return. There has always been a sense of harmony among its artists—and no matter how big someone like Björk gets, there’s always a ready excitement to collaborate with new artists and mediums to try something new.

For instance, Smekkleysa teamed up with Plata, a newly formed Icelandic record label that launched just this July, to release a nine-track compilation album that takes listeners through Reykjavik’s club, art pop, and experimental scenes. Two days after the eclipse, they threw a launch party at Smekkleysa’s record store in downtown Reykjavík.

Despite always sensing this collective support, this is the first trip where I learned a phrase that encapsulates the feeling: DIT, or “Do It Together.” “People tend to naturally come together here, not unlike a collective,” says Siggi.

At Echolalia, DIT underpinned everything from the textile weaving workshop that asked attendees to make a giant piece of art together to the openness of the attendees themselves. I met groups of people traveling together who had met on event-specific Reddit forums just weeks before.

There were nine DJs total—all pegged as friends of Björk’s. Icelanders Gummi Arnalds, Ronja, Knackered, sideproject, and Los Caballos played alongside Barcelona-based Arca, US-based Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, and Shanghai-based 33EMYBW. DJs greeted each other mid-set as one would set up to follow the other’s act, there was an epic hug between Arca and Björk, and friends were brought on stage to hype the crowd (Ronja, looking at you).

Björk is a walking testament to the idea of “doing it together.” In recent years, she has been far more involved in uplifting both established and up-and-coming artists, making relatively surprise cameos (Rosalia, “Berghain”), collaborating with Venezuelan producer Arca as a co-producer on the Vulnicara and Utopia albums, and working with musicians like Shygirl and Sega Bodega for Fossora. By building upon her own legacy, she’s actively nurturing a future generation of music-makers, one held together by collaboration and boundary-less experimentation.

Given the ethos of this event, it makes sense that the crowd could have doubled as an international departures terminal at an airport. I made friends with a lovely mother-daughter duo from Quebec I deeply hope to cross paths with again; met a fellow New Yorker; recognized at least three people I had seen wandering the sister Echolalia exhibit at The National Gallery of Iceland days earlier, chatted with plenty of new stateside buddies, and had a quick conversation with a model from Lithuania. But there were just as many locals bridging everything together.

Even though it was a one-day event, this 10-hour rave was a culmination of the lifetime of Smekkleysa’s work, which, at the end of the day, is all about bringing people together for the love of music.

And while the eclipse brought international attention to the event, it’s far from the only gathering like this that they’ve hosted. “From 1987 to 1990, maybe 1992, we would do regular variety shows called Smekkleysukvöld, or Bad Taste Evenings,” Siggi says. “People would create all sorts of stuff for that—everything from writing little plays that would be performed on stage to creating spoof bands.” In 2000, the crew put on The Word Music, a four-day festival that gathered experimental poets, musicians, and more. “We probably didn’t imagine still doing these things at our age today,” Bragi slipped in.

But they’re still doing these things well. If you’ve been to a live show, you’ve felt the camaraderie that comes with feeling so in tune with whatever is coming out of the speakers. There are few feelings more human than locking eyes with a stranger for a second, massive smiles on your faces, as you catch yourselves grooving to the same song transition. Now, imagine an entire crowd in the middle of a lava rock park that doubles as a disc golf course doing the same thing, actively becoming a singular dance move. This was Echolalia for the eight hours I was there, and likely for the last two that I missed because my feet just couldn’t dance anymore.