My Side-Voyage to Middle Earth

It may have been an asinine idea: hopping aboard a last-minute flight from Reykjavík up to the West Fjords—those craggy finger-like peninsulas sprouting from the northwest part of the island—on the eve of my departure from Iceland. I’d been duly warned that a raunchy storm brewing off the coast might creep in and put a stop to all flights between Ísafjör∂ur and Reykjavík. No problem. I’d just fly up there for the night, poke around and return the next morning before the weather deteriorated. In ’n’ out, bullet dodged, second-guessers quieted. The weather gods wanted me to catch my flight out of Reykjavík the following afternoon, I was sure of it.

Here’s the thing: you don’t fly all the way to Iceland to do a story on Mugison without paying a visit to the West Fjords; his career is just too knotted up with this locale. Even though it’s a mere 40-minute flight from Reykjavík, you leave one world and touch down in an entirely different one. Welcome to the weird Iceland, jagged corners exposed. It’s a wonder folks up here don’t worship a pagan fish-headed god, as the fishing industry is primarily what keeps the lights on in these remote villages. Towering, sheer cliff faces hug the town’s periphery; glacial architecture at its finest. Up here, a day’s sail from the Arctic Circle, nature polishes her wintry talons. (In 1995, an early-morning avalanche killed 14 people—nearly 10 percent of the town’s total population.)

My two big reasons for laughing in the face of better judgment:

(1) Sú∂avík church
This small, country church located one bay over from Ísafjör∂ur became Mugison’s recording studio while working on his first film soundtrack Niceland and, eventually, parts of Mugimama! Mugison’s girlfriend Rúna, who’s originally from Sú∂avík, asked the church if he could use it since he liked the organ and was trying to find a more suitable recording space. “They were like, ‘Whatever, here’s the key, do what you want.’ I was there for two months. Sometimes I didn’t even go home, I slept on the altar. It’s really hard to swear and talk on the phone and browse the Internet or whatever in a church. So you have to just work.”

(2) Aldrei fór ég su∂ur
The name of Mugison’s celebrated Ísafjör∂ur music festival roughly translates to: “I never went south” (an old saying that pokes fun at those who abandoned the West Fjords for the cosmopolitan niceties of life in temperate Reykjavík).

Mugison got the idea while in London one summer performing at a Rough Trade music festival that’s lineup includes a host of up-and-coming talent. He thought it would be fun to put on a similar festival—only “bigger and more weird”—in Ísafjör∂ur where “PapaMug” is the harbormaster. Mugison talked to some musician friends and everyone got excited about the idea. “We even talked to Björk [about playing] when we met her downtown when we were drunk. She said we were ‘cutie pies’ and for a long time we thought that meant ‘yes.’”

Even though Björk declined to perform, plenty of other people got excited about the idea of an all-day music festival where the only remuneration would be a damn good time. “We figured Sigur Rós was too big so we asked them if they could just come over and do an acoustic set. And they showed up in cowboy hats and were doing hillbilly versions of all their old tunes.” Mugison invited popular acts to perform, but he also extended the invitation to musicians with far lower profiles—everyone from the local elementary-school choir to high-school garage bands to Ísafjör∂ur’s leather-sporting hair-metal act The Nine Elevens.

“Every band gets just the same amount of time,” Mugison assures me. “There’s no headlining issues, no usual kind of hierarchy thing you have at festivals. It’s all about just people coming together and listening to music and getting exposed to different kinds of stuff.”

The inaugural festival in the spring of 2004 took place in a fish factory, followed the next year by a different factory that was in the middle of being converted to a theatre but still had fire-hazardous plastic sheets covering the inside walls. Just like Mugison’s music, the festival succeeds on its raw, unfinished, DIY charm. (For more on Aldrei fór ég su∂ur, visit: www.skidavikan.is/festival)

To conclude the story of my little jaunt to the West Fjords, the storm waiting off the coast moved in swiftly and stranded me in Ísafjör∂ur. A couple days later when it finally started to break, I caught a ride with a fisherman who’d rented a car to drive down to Reykjavík where he was late catching a routine fishing expedition. He sped at breakneck velocity down the asphalt ribbon weaving in and out of each fjord, hardly impressed by the snowy conditions outside. I thought I was going to die, but I didn’t. Then again: I thought it was an asinine idea to make this trip in the first place, but it wasn’t.

* Click here to read Jason Killingsworth's Mugison feature from issue 19.