"En Islandia no vamos a la iglesias, damos un paseo". El paisaje y la música.

“I was brought up in the suburbs of Reykjavík,” says Björk, sitting in a small cafe in the heart of the Icelandic capital while the rain skitters about outside. “I lived next to the last block of flats, and then it was moss and tundra. I used to walk a lot on my own and sing at the top of my lungs. I think a lot of Icelandic people do this. You don’t go to church or a psychotherapist – you go for a walk and feel better.”

Iceland’s most celebrated musician is feeling particularly impassioned about her homeland: she had just held a press conference to raise awareness of the threat to the Icelandic highlands, an area of extraordinary beauty and ecological diversity that may be irreparably damaged by plans to lay a subsea power cable to the UK, accompanied by above-ground power stations and infrastructure. 

That Björk chose to deliver this message in the middle of Iceland’s annual Airwaves music festival is significant. While the festival showcases bands from all over the world, it is also a celebration of Icelandic creativity, of its music and its literature. To make this statement at Airwaves was to tether that creativity to the land itself.

Much has been written about how Iceland’s landscape infuses its music. In the popular narrative it is “epic”, “sweeping” and “volcanic”, simultaneously hot and cold, and wave-swept, offbeat and outlandish, carried by a tradition of sagas and fairytales.

But there is unquestionably something distinctive about Icelandic music – in its structure and shape and spirit of experimentation. You feel it in Of Monsters and Men’s furious folk and in the extraordinary compositions of Sigur Rós. (As one academic paper noted, their music “could be said to express sonically both the isolation of their Icelandic location and to induce a feeling of hermetic isolation in the listener through the climactic and melodic intensity of their sound”).

And it’s there in Björk’s own work, notably her 1997 album Homogenic, which sought to capture in sound the geography of her birthplace. Its producer, Markus Dravs, recalls her instruction that it should feel like “rough volcanoes with soft moss growing over it”.

Across the cafe table from Björk sits the writer Andri Snær Magnason, who is the head of the festival’s literary wing, Airwords, and one of the country’s leading authors – of novels, plays, children’s literature and poetry. One of his most fascinating works saw him collaborate with the Icelandic group Múm, who set his words to music. In 2006, he published Dreamland, a non-fiction work that took the temperature of modern Iceland, looking specifically at its environmental crisis and its landscape.

“Those are my favourite mountains,” he says later as we drive out of Reykjavík. “They always look as if the sun is shining on them.” The landscape out here is dourly spectacular: the clouds shift over fields of slate grey and brilliant yellow gorse. We are headed towards the former home of Iceland’s Nobel prize-winning poet Halldór Laxness. Crammed into the car with us are Laxness’s granddaughter, Auður Jónsdóttir, who is also a writer, and her young son, Leif, who has recently fallen in love with the music of Michael Jackson, and sits in the back seat, clamouring for music.

“Halldór is the grand poet,” Magnason explains as we stand in Laxness’s home, which is now a museum. “His light or his shadow is over all of us. He was a tower in literature.” Laxness, he explains, was of the generation that in effect created the modern Iceland in the mid 1940s. “All of the institutions we have now were created then,” adds his son-in-law Halldór Thorgeirsson, who has joined our little tour. “The music schools, too. Laxness’s publisher went to London in 1945 to purchase a large number of pianos and then distributed them around the country.”

When trying to understand the music and literature of Iceland, it is important to understand the national psychology. “The psyche of Iceland is about wanting to be acknowledged,” Magnason says. “It isn’t superior, it wasn’t a Viking mentality, it was to be recognised as on a par with anything abroad. Björk and her music was the first time we did something first, that people elsewhere were copying us. And she has the same mentality as Laxness’s publisher: that if you leave pianos all around town, eventually they will be played.”

You sense that legacy in the breadth of the Iceland Airwaves festival’s lineup, from the 20-strong all-female hip-hop outfit Reykjavíkurdætur to the curious garage-punk of Grísalappalísa and the electronica of GusGus. It’s even in the music of John Grant, the Colorado native who has made Iceland his home, and performs two shows with the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra, speaking to the crowd in a combination of English and Icelandic, evidently relishing the way the latter rolls off the tongue.

Upstairs at the museum, in the small bedroom adjoining Laxness’s writing room, we peer through a telescope positioned at a window that looks out over the swimming pool and trees towards the mountains and craggy fields. Jónsdóttir is recalling the various habits and contradictions of her grandfather: how he smoked Cuban cigars and drank beer, although beer was not allowed in Iceland then, how he wrote standing up and kept his 1955 Nobel prize stuffed away in a cupboard, and how “he played Bach to escape everything. Even when he had dementia he could still play. He carried Bach’s music everywhere.”

“And he always had the same routine,” she says. “He woke up, had breakfast at 9am, went upstairs, worked for two or three hours, and then he would go out walking for hours. Sometimes he didn’t come back and they had to call the police.” Her grandmother would look for him through the telescope as he ploughed across the land, distinctive in his yellow scarf. “We have many gods and obey them all, and they us,” he once wrote, “the god of the sea and the god of the land, the god of thunder and the god of poetry.”

Back at the cafe, Björk is talking about her relationship with the landscape. “When I was a teenager I used to hitchhike,” she recalls, “and camp, and spend a few days on my own each year. The first money I got, when I was 13, I used to buy a tent. It was my ideal freedom. And I don’t think I’m alone in that ideal. There’s a sacredness that comes with this landscape.”

Original extraido de The Guardian.