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 organisation, 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 travelling 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).