Björk's Total Eclipse Of The Heart
August 11
I wake up from a 13-hour sleep at around 7am, missing what the weather says is the only sunny day in Reykjavik that week. The mind and spirit always go further than the body. There aren’t taxis (that I can see) or Ubers or Lyfts here, but the public transit is surprisingly efficient. I take my suitcases and head into town.
When I was here last year covering a local indie festival, I was given a global membership to Kjarval, which is everything Soho House claims to be. I peek in and find, to my delight, the pass still works. After finding the coffee machine, I sit there and plot the week while digesting the clanging church bells and glitchy dimensions of the new Arca album.
Around noon, I get a text from my contact at Iceland Music: “you can use our office if you need a desk/coffee?” I do. The office is thankfully across the street, so lugging the suitcases isn’t hard. He greets me downstairs and helps me settle in. After filing the first of several pieces around the rave, I get the keys to an apartment a block from where the action is. The walk up the street is electric with life: tourists with eclipse t-shirts, a street vendor selling commemorative coins of the sun turned into an outline.
I have 15 minutes before a panel at Smekkleysa, the record store/ brick-and-mortar manifestation of a label founded by The Sugarcubes. There’s a short line for ticket pickup. After a brief panel led by Einar Örn Benediktsson, the band’s former vocalist and trumpet player, there’s a small set of local acts. Waiting for the set to start, I text a few friends I know are in town for the rave and, digging through the stacks, I meet a fab girl in a fur coat who somehow is also Venezuelan. It’s comforting to know so many of us are here on this cold esoteric island country. We exchange contacts and make vague promises to meet in New York, where she lives. My friend B texts back: ya estoy llegando, nos vemos abajo.
The Icelandic scene is singular in that its baseline is experimental (is it any surprise, when the country’s most important musician is communing with mushrooms in the woods to get inspired? Of the showcase, Knackered is the strong point, playing a freewheeling set that smashes fast BPM and drum machine together with irreverence. It’s not lost on any of us that this was where Björk would spin reggaeton on her full moon parties.
As the Brazilian baddies with the long acrylics and septum piercings vogue down, a tall cutie stands out, curls brushing the air as he headbangs to her set. We talk afterwards, when I tell him he’s an amazing dancer. Then, walking with my friends to get a drink, I see him on a bench, a pizza in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He waves.
“See you tomorrow,” he says, smiling.
August 12
The eclipse is coming, and the energy is scattered. In the same hour, my ride seemingly falls through; I get a frantic text about the coverage, and as I’m cutting up some cheese for a sandwich, I slice my finger open. Eclipses are moments of shift. They’re demanding, brutal, thirsty for blood. I decide I want to transition with the eclipse, even if it’s cold. I put on an all-white outfit, and layer on top of it, hiding the look until after the light returns.
30 minutes of a river of blood down the drain, lots of Neosporin, and several changed bandages later, I head to the Iceland Music office for a quick meeting. It’s raining and windy, definitely too cloudy for an eclipse sighting. We sort everything, and I get a text: my friends can take me after all. Just as quickly as everything fell apart, it came back together. In a few hours, the light will be devoured and reborn from the darkness.
I find M and his boyfriend a few streets up from Smekkleysa, and we ride out to Víðistaðatún. They have “a little G and a little acid.” I’ve been raving relatively sober for years now and don’t plan to end that streak, but it’s good to know. The rain is coming in and out, and I resign myself to not seeing the eclipse itself. The vibe at Echolalia more than makes up for it. I tuck my pink eclipse glasses away and take out my earplugs, heading straight to the medical tent where they give me a fresh bandage. “And you’re still going to dance?” the nurse asks me.
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith kicks things off, playing breaks on her Buchla synths. She’s followed by Gummi Arnalds. We dance hard in the rain. After, there's Icelandic wünderkind Ronja’s set accompanied by a Japanese musician wielding a sledgehammer, another musician prancing in a white dress, and a gangly punk guy who loses his balance. He falls all over the fresh flowers set up on stage, and gets right back to jumping to the smashed-up punk, EDM, and deconstructed club beats. Sidestage, a countdown to the eclipse starts at 59 minutes.
Before Arca comes on, somehow, the rain subsides. Clad in an all-black Loewe dress, she opens with Afro-Venezuelan drums. “Leo-leo-lee-leo-leo-la, leo-leo-leo-leo-leo-leo-la”, a vocalization I grew up listening to rings out as she clambers on stage, letting loose next to B, who also knows what it means to hear our music. She gets back behind the decks, brings in a hard bass, and proceeds to dismember it. We’re front left, rocking to the beat as Arca moves us through a high-energy set that at one point includes the acapella of Tokischa’s song with La Mas Doll and DJ Yirvin’s hard fusion classic, “Pan Con Mortadella”. If there was any magic being invoked for the eclipse, this was the clear opening of the portal. After dancing in cold rain and wind, my body starts to radiate with heat.
Near the end of the set, the grey sky behind Arca takes on a red tint. She shouts out mother Björk, and ducks out as the countdown above and side stage is at ten minutes, right before the key moment, appearing on the lineup as TOTALITY. I look up and catch a few birds flying frantically. The light leaves suddenly. In the darkness, somebody begins a “Free Free Palestine” chant. The crowd gives this intention to the eclipse, some of us lighting cigarettes. I burn a rose-scented papier d’Arménie. My finger pulses. I give the eclipse old loves, lost friendships, and everything weighing me down before stripping off my top layer, feeling reborn.
The light returns, and white balloons peek out from atop the decks. Björk comes out wearing an insane dress, white balloons blown out in every direction like the wings of a Biblically-accurate angel. She starts with the 2001: A Space Odyssey theme. It’s a fact that Björk isn’t so much a DJ as a curator, her sets being more a peek into what she’s listening to right now. It’s expectedly eclectic in the best way: Kelela. Arca’s new album (and Safety Trance’s “El Alma Que Te Trajo”. North Nigerian auto-tuned devotionals. She ends with the Conrad Taylor remix of Rosalía’s “Berghain”. When you rave, if you’re lucky, you get a moment of transcendence. Fist bumping to this song in Reykjavik with this specific crowd was one of those moments.
Knackered takes the stage, playing a similar set to the one I was very glad to have lived up close at Smekkleysa, so I take a break, walk around. The grass is a little greener from the rain. People are scattered, relaxed. Finding M and his boyfriend, we talk about the things we gave to the eclipse, how light we feel now. As the festival ends, Spanish-Icelandic duo LOSCABALLOS close on a high note with reggaeton, dembow, and dancehall. Waist-wining to Spice’s viral “So Mi Like It (Raw)” in Iceland was a reminder that this is, in fact, an island.
August 13
At the Icelandic hospital, I get familiar with the local humor. After explaining how I lost the tip of my finger: “You cut a piece of cheese but ended up cutting off a piece of you!” Yeah.
The Echolalia ticket lets you access an exhibit at the National Gallery of Iceland. B and I watch Björk’s “Ancestress” performance and a beautiful live show on giant screens. “Tabula Rasa” hits extra hard after an eclipse that truly left us all with the feeling of a clean slate. In the line, two boys who met while waiting to enter the screening grab and kiss each other in the dark.
We head to the grocery store and go home to cook, a calm moment after yesterday. My friend Andervel, a Mexican folk singer who’s been based in Iceland for almost eight years now, links up with us before we head to a noise show at Mengi. “It’s a safe space to experiment”, he says on the walk there. I’m ready to see something freaky as hell.
We’re greeted outside by several local performers smoking cigarettes, including Ronja and Gummi. I thank them for their sets yesterday, and then we hear a screeching electric guitar. On the floor, the Japanese performer who was onstage yesterday with a sledgehammer leans further into sonic destruction. The crowd is cool, curious, and well-dressed. He’s followed by more cigarettes and an experimental tarot performance led by Ronja, where folks were invited to have a card projected on top of them as a sort of pseudo-reading. Yuki, a local journalist at the Reykjavik Grapevine, gets the High Priestess. One of the divas I twirled with yesterday gets the Knight of Wands. I get The Tower. We all make shapes in front of the wall, part of a really warm scene that clashes with the outside cold.
The after is nearby (like everything in Reykjavik) at the record store 12Tonar. After a long chat with Andervel, I buy two vinyls for one euro, maybe the cheapest thing I’ve bought in Iceland. We get a drink and chat outside, and when we go back in afterwards, Yuki comes in with a motley crew, a small procession involving a xylophone and a taxidermied duck, which her friend proceeds to tap on the silver keys. Of course, we all clap at the end.
August 14
I’m typing up my notes at Kjarval, processing the past two days. M and his boyfriend go to the West Fjords, so I look for new nature I can reach by bus before my midnight flight out of Iceland. I settle on the Kvika Footbath, and enlist B to come with after a visit to Olafur Eliasson’s Harpa building, and a few minutes dancing in its colorful textured glass façade.
Two buses later, we arrive at this tiny hot spring at one of the island’s many tips. There’s a couple there soaking their feet, and after they leave, I strip down to my speedo, soaking in a jacuzzi for one with a mountain and a sea and an expanse before me. B films a modern dance video in front of the landscape I’m taking in and eventually joins the soak.
When we finish enjoying the hot spring and dry off, an older woman approaches with a small child. “My husband knows the artist who made this,” she says. “She also made a hill somewhere else in Iceland.” We say we weren’t able to see it, and she smiles. “Well, you simply must come back!”
