Stormkrókur

STORMKRÓKUR is an electronic duo from Iceland founded in 2020 by composers Jesper Pedersen and Páll Ivan frá Eiðum as a reaction to the restrictions of musical live performances during pandemic. 

The music of STORMKRÓKUR is seeking new inspiration in techniques used by noise musicians of yesteryear using non-linear feedback through analog sound equipment like mixing desks, stomp boxes and modular synthesizers. The sound world is raw and abstract sounding but with clear dialogues emerging between the sounds walking the fine line between chaos and order.

www.pallivan.is

www.slatur.is/jesper

RAFLOST 2022

The Festival for Electronic Arts in Reykjavík took place in Reykjavik on the 21th – 28th of May 2022. That year’s edition was in collaboration with Tómas Manoury and the Intelligent Instrument Lab.

Saturday 21st of May

Wednesday 25th of May

This event is supported by Miðbæjarsjóður

Thursday 26th of May

Friday 27th of May

 

GEIGEN

GEIGEN is a techno violin performance duo formed in San Francisco, in the fall of 2018, by artist Gígja Jónsdóttir and composer Pétur Eggertsson. They discovered that both of them had quit playing the violin in their adolescence after many years of training. The stagnated music education system had scared them off but the violin had a big impact on their lives and they shared the interest to bring the instrument back into their work.

GEIGEN rebels against the classical image of the violin, it is the need to break out of traditional systems, it embraces the violin and attempts to bring it into the future. GEIGEN is an exploration of how to stretch the sonic world of the violin, both keeping the acoustic quality of the instrument as well as using different effects and filters and mixing it with techno creating something other-worldly.

GEIGEN creates transformative concert experiences, called the Geigen Galaxies, where the audience are not only audience but participants and fellow travellers in a spaceship nightclub.

GEIGEN has performed multiple Geigen Galaxies in various venues and festivals around Iceland. Each Geigen Galaxy is a unique experience, constantly developing – both sonically and performatively.

Kristín Helga Ríkharðsdóttir

Kristin Helga Rikhardsdottir is an Icelandic visual artist, filmmaker and summertime park ranger currently living and working in Reykjavik. Using video, installations, photography and sound performances she explores the hyper-reality of everyday environment. She takes inspiration from her surroundings and works with society as an insider, a full participant and player. Her work has been featured in exhibitions in Iceland, as well as Sweden, the Czech Republic and Colombia. She holds a B.A. in Fine Arts from the Icelandic Academy of the Arts.

https://www.kristinhelga.com

 

Tumi Magnusson

Tumi Magnússon was born in Iceland in 1957. He studied art at The Icelandic College of Art and Crafts, and at AKI (Academie voor Beeldende Kunst) in the Netherlands. His first solo exhibition was in the Red House Gallery in Akureyri, Iceland, in 1981, and he has shown extensively since then. His early exhibited works included objects, photographs and 8mm films.
In the early eighties he began experimenting with drawing and painting. His motives were figurative and equally informed by the free painting style of the period and conceptual art.
Over the following decade he experimented with the boundaries of painting as a medium, and his work evolved into installations of paintings and murals. This in turn led to his use of the photograph as a medium for installational wall works, and to video/sound installations.  Today he primarily works with multi-channel video and audio where the sound part plays an increasingly important role.
His installations very often have a strong site specific element, and he has maintained an adventurous and experimental approach to art.
Tumi Magnússon was a professor at the Iceland Academy of Art from 1999 to 2005, and at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art from 2005 to 2011. He currently lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark, and spends his summers in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland.

Lars From Mars

Lars Graugaard / Lars from Mars
Lars Graugaard is the composer of contemporary experimental music, who doubles as electronica performer using the alias Lars from Mars. Sometimes he is not quite certain which name to use – obviously, he needs more names.
Lars started out as a instrumental performer, later also composer of score music. He still composes quite a lot of score music, but in recent years he has used the computer as his performance vehicle, arriving at an electro style that brings together rhythms, textures and interaction. Much of it is with a strong drive, and much of it has rich and sustained pads. But however different these styles are, they are closely related in his music, because the power that music has to communicate is the passion behind his music.

Harald Jordal

Harald Jordal presents a repertoire of instrumental music influenced by electroacoustic music, digital noise, alternative rock. He sometimes sings, in English and his mother tongue, Norwegian.
Coming from both the computer and the electric guitar, the sound field explored is glitchy and exciting, and tactile and harmonic.Harald Jordal is a composer from Norway. He works in close relation with performers to create pieces with elements of electronics and theatre. In his solo works, he focuses on mixing different styles of electronic music, from contemporary to popular genres, through programming and electric guitar performance.

His music has been performed in Aarhus (WP), Vilnius (WP), Graz, Helsinki, and Berlin, and regularly in Oslo. In 2017 he co-produced the bronze winner of Europe’s First Student 3D Audio Production competition in Graz.
As of 2017, he organizes the concert series LISA, and is a composer and electronic performer in the international contemporary music ensemble Echtcore.

Alex McLean

Alex McLean a.k.a. Yaxu makes live broken techno using his handmade programming language TidalCycles, a technique called “Live Coding”. He co-founded Algorave, bringing live coding to dancefloors, a growing movement that has already spread to over eighty cities. He has performed widely since the year 2000 in several collaborations including Slub [http://slub.org] and CCAI [http://ccai.lurk.org], and at major festivals including Sonar Barcelona, Club Transmediale Berlin, Sonic Acts Amsterdam, Earzoom Ljubljana, NODE Frankfurt, Ars Electronica Linz, Dissonanze Rome, Vivo Mexico City, Lovebytes Sheffield, Lambdasonic Gent, Bluedot and STRP Eindhoven.

Alex’s performances are in general improvised, however he has started recording music, leading to the six track Peak Cut EP on Sheffield label Computer Club. Bleep.com said of it “.. Yaxu’s polyrhythmic and hyperreal strand of techno is showcased on cuts like Public Life and Cyclic showing that he is not just testing the confines of how music can be consumed but also how genres can sound. A truly forward-thinking influx of material from Yaxu and the Computer Club team”. He’s currently working on his first solo album Spicule, again with Computer Club.

Alex is active across the digital arts, including organising the annual Festival of Algorithmic and Festival Movement [http://algomech.com], co-founding the Algorave and TOPLAP live coding movements, and instigating the live coding environment TidalCycles [http://tidalcycles.org]. He works as post-doc researching ancient textiles as digital art for Deutsches Museum [http://penelope.hypotheses.org/], and as a trustee of Access Space Sheffield. 

https://slab.org

Sam Rees

Sam Rees is a British artist based in Iceland, with a passion for DIY cultures. Sam creates interactive dioramas, mixing discarded, circuit bent toy robots with dense collages of found objects to form sequential narratives and absurd scenes.

He has been teaching interactive media at the Iceland University of the Arts since 2014 and was a co-founder of the Fjúk residency in the Northeast of Iceland.

www.instagram.com/sam.t.rees

www.ififoundafrozentimewarpidputitinthemicrowaveatyourhouse.co.uk/

Hlolli

Hlöðver (Hlolli) Sigurðsson, is a composer, live-coder and programmer from Reykjavik based in Berlin. He started live codeing in 2013 during his studies in the Iceland Academy of the Arts and has since then performed regularly with his own free software called Panaeolus in algoraves and festivals in Europe and Americas. Hlöðver is also active in various creative coding communities in Berlin in collaboration with other digital artists and has given talks and workshops on live-coding. Hlöðver is creator, maintainer and contributor of dozens of different music and audiovisual software, all of which can be found on github under free-software licences. The algorave performances from Hlöðver are always improvised and could be described as wild sounds morphing in texture over time with many layers of asynchronous loops, which has shown to be effective in prompting the audience to dance as well as crashing the software in colorful ways.

www.hlolli.com

The Goodiepal Equation documentary film

THE GOODIEPAL EQUATION documentary film

  • Director: Sami Sänpäkkilä
  • Editor: Eeva Tuomi
  • Producer: Harri Sippola / Moderni Kanuuna
  • Length: 71 min

Goodiepal (real name Kristian Parl Bjørn Vester, b. 1974–76) is a Danish musician, performance artist, lecturer and activist operating on the fringes of society. Goodiepal rides thousands of kilometres on a self-built bicycle that he uses to power his shows. He has released a record with a genuine 500-krone banknote embedded in the vinyl – priced at 250 kroner. Goodiepal has put together an exhibition for the National Museum of Denmark comprising all his material possessions, and he creates his art outside of customary institutions and norms.

Goodiepal’s best friend, the former 1960s rock star Poul Erik, is another true eccentric, a hoarder living among things he has collected from skips. His dream is to own a piece of each item ever produced by human beings. Goodiepal considers Poul Erik his partner in crime, although his audience would prefer to see him without him. Goodiepal’s life is shadowed by Huntington’s disease, an inherited degenerative disease of the brain that has driven men in his family to suicide. Doctors find odd tumours in his head and he begins to misplace and forget things. Many of his closest friends are likewise affected by illness.Goodiepal’s activism turns increasingly radical and he drifts further and further away from social safety nets. Goodiepal challenges us to reflect on our view of the world. What remains of us if we only exist to serve the system? What is the Goodiepal Equation?

Resterne af Rigsfællesskabet

Resterne af Rigsfællesskabet (Remnants of the Danish Commonwealth) is Heðin Ziska Davidsen [FO] and Jesper Pedersen [DK/IS]. They play music with modular synthesizers. The music is experimental, and improvised on the spot.

R.A.R. has played concerts at Iceland Airwaves off-venue, Raflost, Mengi and in 2019 they will embark on a journey to the outskirts of the Danisk Commonwealth with the Inuit drum dancer Miké Thomsen.

https://www.facebook.com/resterne/?ref=br_rs

 

Troy Rogers [US]

RobotRickshaw_Lakewalk_iso_2014-10-25_1200px_Melissa-MakiFor over 13 years, composer Troy Rogers’ creative work has focused on the development and exploration of robotic musical instruments as generators of new musical possibilities. As a musical robot maker, he co-founded Expressive Machines Musical Instruments (EMMI), a group of composers dedicated to exploring and expanding the potential of robotic musical instruments. As a Fulbright scholar, he spent time at the Logos Foundation in Ghent, Belgium working with Godfried-Willem Raes and what is perhaps the world’s largest robot orchestra, where he developed a singing vocal robot, Stemmetje. Living the life of an early 21st century semi-nomadic robot herder, he resides in Duluth, MN when not touring the country in the RoboRig, a mobile platform for the development and dissemination of music for robots. He performs on streets and stages alike as Robot Rickshaw. Rogers is also a committed independent educator, regularly presenting lectures and offering Making Music with Robots and STEAM education workshops at universities, galleries, community art centers, makerspaces, and schools throughout the US.

http://www.troy82.com

Monika Fryčová [CZ]

meMonika Fryčová is an Czech audio-visual artist, performer and writer based in Seydisfjordur, Iceland, southern Portugal and elswere.
In recent years she has been focused on Iceland due to its intense confrontations of the elements and unique meetings, as a curator of few international projects mainly Czech – Icelandic (ISLANDIA, NoD, gallery SKOLSKA28/Prague, OPEN SPRINGS/Reykjavik, Untitled Festival/Bildudalur,
DIRECTRIX with E. Isleifsdottir etc.)
From 2016 she is co-founder of Open space initiative Blue Factory in Seydisfjordur, east Iceland together with  þorgeir and Sigurbergur Sigurdsson. http://brotherhood.esy.es/
She currently works on permanent project Fantasy versus Discipline, The Artist as an Etnographer and organizes intercultural dialogue between Iceland and Mauritius, Czech Republic and Portugal.

Olga Szymula [PO]

olga szymula tallin mim 2 (1)

Olga Szymula is a Polish experimental sound maker and performer. She currently lives and creates her electro-acoustic worlds in Denmark. Her works take forms in concerts, records, film scores, installations and performances.

‘By diving into the ocean of various intensities, qualities and forms she travels the sonic trip
of twisted characters, imaginary landscapes and dramatic turns.’

In music her main intention is to explore the full spectrum of sound and its dynamics, intensities and qualities. She bends and plays around with music forms, combining playful melodies and songs with abstract forms and noises.

www.olgaszymula.net
www.nomadicisland.net
www.youtube.com/watch?v=feeLEcGVHVQ&t=2s

The performance is supported by DPA, Danske Populær Autorer

DPA_logoer_2014

Amy Knoles [US]

18486291_1434160833321361_5252477888670244589_nAmy Knoles has been percussionist for the world renowned California EAR Unit, played solo shows and various collaborations all over the world, as well as teaching percussion at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in Los Angeles.

Throughout her career she has increasingly been using electronic percussion instruments and percussive triggering of electronic sound generations. Friday May 26th she’ll be giving a lecture/workshop at the Iceland Academy of the Arts. In the workshop she will demonstrate her equipment and techniques, as well as giving participants hands-on experience. In the evening she’ll perform a concert sharing the evening with Monika Fryčová [CZ] audiovisual artist, performer and writer.

Friday May 26th 13:00: Lecture/workshop

Friday May 26th 20:00: Performance

Both events takes place in Sölvhóll – the concert hall of Iceland Academy of the Arts, Sölvhólsgata 13. Entrance is a back of the house, from the Skúlagata side.

http://www.amyknoles.org

Reykjavik Modular Meet

This year’s Raflost Festival will be hosting a modular meet Saturday May 27th 13:00-17:00.

Do you have a modular synthesizer or are you interested in modular synthesizers and sound synthesis, and electronic music creation in general? Bring your modular, semi-modular, video synth or DIY creation and patch with other modular synthesizer enthusiasts (bring your own little monitor setup and power). There’ll also be opportunity to talk about patching techniques, synthesis techniques, building a modular synth, analog, digital, DIY modules and more. There’ll also be opportunity to do short performances (Stereo PA and video projector in house).

modularmeet

The event will take place at the IAA Music dept. Concert Hall “Sölvhóll” (large gray barrack on the corner of Klapparstígur and Skúlagata). Free entrance.

Arnar Ómarsson

Arnar Ómarsson is an artist and project manager as well as giving talks about project development, cross disciplinary collaborations and fine art. He graduated with a 1st from the University of the Arts’ London in 2011 with a degree in fine art photography and has since been based in Denmark and Iceland by most part. Arnar is the curator of Húsavík Explorer Festival and project manager and co-founder at REITIR in Siglufjörður. In his work he addresses the overlapping area of technology and nature. Anthropology of technology informs his practise as well as his passion for science and human explorations. Favourable mediums include, prints, installations, sculptures, video works and digital/online works.

DST_9297

For RAFLOST Arnar will be collaborating with Sam Rees on a low-tech hack and robot makinge project.