Mugison

Paste joins the bearded troubadour in Reykjavík as he prepares to carry his bizarre musical truth to American shores.

"The chicken is one of very few birds / That never can fly / But even with his head chopped off / He’ll still give it a hell of a try / How beautiful is that" - Mugison (from “The Chicken Song”)

“I have the murderer’s name on my desk” claimed the headline published in an Icelandic newspaper in December 1974. The man responsible for the quote—the chief investigator in what would become the most legendary criminal case in the country’s history—meant only that he had in his possession a roll containing the names of all 220,000 Icelandic citizens. His protracted inquiry into the alleged murder of two men who’d mysteriously vanished in unrelated cases that year would eventually, however, whittle that collection of names down to just one: Sævar Ciesielski.

The trial produced a staggering 10,000 pages of court records, mostly due its complicated nature. The prosecution charged Ciesielski with double murder even though the bodies of the two men never surfaced, nor did a murder weapon or forensic evidence of any sort. The trial lurched forward, propelled by a convoluted series of guilt-shifting testimony.

Despite the case’s somewhat dubious proceedings, Ciesielski—a 20-year-old hippie who’d already gotten in trouble for smuggling hashish and defrauding the Icelandic national phone company before his implication in the missing-persons case—would spend the two years leading up to the trial in solitary confinement. During his incarceration, which included routine torture and forced sleep deprivation, he proved unable (or unwilling) to point investigators to the location of the bodies he and several accomplices had allegedly buried in the crater-marred volcanic plains outside the capital city of Reykjavík.

Public opinion—and everybody seemed to have one—was split. Many felt he’d been wrongly accused. Still, others saw this young hippie as Charles Manson’s Icelandic equivalent, a frightening byproduct of the drug generation, a hippie burnout whose brain chemistry had been permanently and dangerously altered.

I wouldn’t learn all the details of Ciesielski’s trial until returning home from Iceland; tonight, in the flesh, he’s just another drunk in a too-big leather jacket and frayed jeans, a woman hanging on his arm. It’s well past midnight and I’m sitting in a bar called Rökkurbarinn (“Dusk” in English) where Icelandic singer/songwriter Mugison and an assortment of his friends and local session players are celebrating the recent completion of his soundtrack to Baltasar Kormákur’s film, A Little Trip To Heaven. Mugison—the 29-year-old musician who walked away from this year’s Icelandic Music Awards with Song of The Year (“Murr Murr,” written with his good friend Pétur), Album of the Year (Mugimama! is This Monkey Music?), Best Artwork (again, Mugimama!) and Performer of the Year (decided by the public)—leans over and discreetly informs me who’s just walked through the door, as I’m the only person in the room who could possibly fail to recognize the notorious ex-con.

Mugison’s bar of choice hosts an unsettling collision of light and darkness. It’s a modest-sized room, located on a side street that runs parallel to Reykjavík’s downtown shopping district. The atmosphere is spacious and brightly illuminated with polished, blonde wood flooring. Sketches of historically significant Icelandic men grace a far wall (when I ask my neighbor at the table, Sammy—who fronts local funk band Jagúar and played trombone on Mugison’s soundtrack—whom the portraits depict, he quips, “Just bums like everyone else in this place”). The bathroom, typically the sketchiest corner of any drinking establishment, sparkles like it’s been detailed with bleach and a toothbrush.

All the while, however, Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” blasts from the jukebox, David Byrne’s voice flatly advising everyone within earshot to “run run, run run run away.” Guns N’ Roses are on deck. The wrinkled woman tending bar carries a severe look on her face; her movements are twitchy and unpredictable. Ciesielski hardly looks out of place among the bar’s male clientele, the majority of them disheveled and draped in leather jackets and emptying glass after glass, thirsty for oblivion.

Over the din of our table’s banter and Axl’s wounded screeching, I ask Mugison, “What do you like most about this bar?”

“Everybody in here has a guilty conscience,” he replies, smiling good-naturedly and turning back to the fray. Someone at the opposite end of the table says something in Icelandic and the party ripples with laughter.

Over the course of spending several days in Iceland with Mugison, whose given name is Örn Elías Gu?mundsson, the idea of conscience surfaces repeatedly in a variety of contexts. His eyes betray hints of mischief but hardly a threatening sort. He laughs easily, his disarming grin widening behind a neatly trimmed beard. When considering an answer to your question, he tugs absently on his erratic, dirty-blond mane, rubbing small tufts between his fingers until they spike in odd directions.

While mixing the new soundtrack’s commercial release one afternoon in Sundlaugin (Sigur Rós’ studio located just a short drive from Reykjavík in Mosfellsbûr), Mugison comments on the difficulty of balancing his career with domestic responsibilities: “It’s a rough balance—the Ms. and the music. Plus, I’ve got a kid now so I’ve got to fight the woman and the guilty conscience. Because music doesn’t feel like a real job. I’ll be messing about and she’s like, ‘Change the diaper!’ [Feigns indignation] ‘I’m working! I’ve got a brilliant phrase here.’”