Iceland Part II

 Voces Thules is an Icelandic music ensemble consisting of 5 male singers and instrumentalists playing Medieval and contemporary music in polyphonic voices.  Here is an extract from a concert at the Nordic festival of Medieval music in Sweden:

Record producer, composer and musician Valgeir Sigurðsson (born 1970) creates a soundscape that blurs the lines between contemporary classical and electronic music.  He has been commissioned to write many film scores, but has also written the likes of chamber operas and orchestral scores.  He has set up his own record label, the bedroom community, where he closely collaborates with many other accomplished musicians to realise his projects.  He wrote the film score to the 2010 environmental documentary Draumalandið (Dreamland) about the damage and destruction caused by the aluminium smelting industry in Iceland.  It was also released as an album and here are some extracts from the documentary with the music and some dramatic footage:

Folktronica and indie pop band Múm (pronounced miooyyuujm apparently...) formed in 1997 in Reykjavik.  Their music is characterised by soft vocals, electronic glitch beats and effects and variety of traditional and unconventional instruments.  Here is a live version of their song A Little Bit, Sometimes from their 2007 album Go Go Smear the Poison Ivy:

Multi-instrumentalist and producer Ólafur Arnalds was born in Mosfellsbaer just outside Reykjavik in 1986.  He mixes strings and piano with loops and beats, a sound ranging from ambient electronic to electronic pop.  Here are a few tracks from his 2020 album Some Kind of Peace:

That's it from Iceland, next we're taking a quick trip to Greenland.  In the meantime you can follow my virtual ramblings on my Tripline map.