Photos and text by Giacomo Cosua reporting from Iceland
I attended last week at Besta Útihátíðin! a music festival that took place in the city of Hella, in the south of Iceland.
10.000 of people at least attended at the Besta, a 2 days festival between the 8th and the 10th of july, organized in a big area where all the people came with their tent for 2 days made by good music and a lot of alcool and fun.
I didn’t know much about the Icelandic music, but thanks to Besta i discovered that there is a huge music background in this country and a lot of people play in a bands or at least they know how to play an istrument.
In the backstage, before the big night concerts of the last day, where performed 2 icelandic bands called “Gus Gus” and the “Quarashi” who played again together after years (sounds like a reunion concert), i met few of the new icelandic bands, and i had a chat with them.
The first band i met was “Vicky”, i really enjoyed the music with this young band made by 3 girls and 1 boy: Orri at drums, Lotta at guitar, Ástrós at bass and Eygló who is the singer. I suggest you to follow them as i think they’ll grow up quick and the Besta Útihátíðin festival .
Another crazy group was for sure the Dandelion Seeds, who i became a good friends and they tried to convince me about their music with a lot of beers, but when i was attending at their concert i tought already that it was a good young music that can spread all around iceland if they work hard together.
One of the youngest band who attended at the festival was for sure The Vintage Caravan, made by Óskar Logi Ágústsson-Guitar & Singer Páll Sólmundur H. Eydal at Bass guitar and vocals and Guðjón Reynisson at Drummer.
Very patriotic they had also a rock version of the Icelandic national anthem, who was quite cool to listen and see the performance of two very improbable guy who waved the Icelandic flags.
Another really good band was the Valdimar, the name comes from the singer who has got the same band name, have a look on the video that i posted here, the music was amazing and i’m sure they’ll have a bigger audience soon also outside Iceland.
I met also other crazy guys called “The Legend Band” and from their website i found this descriptions:
As the tale tells one night their passion for electronica, plus a seemingly quasi-telepathic studio work process -and copious amounts of beer – led to the first Legend song, Devil In Me, to be born. This song was leaked to an Icelandic radio station and soared up to the top of the charts. Quite funny!
For this events POSI+TIVE Magazine wants to say thanks to Guðný Pála and Andri Ómarsson from Besta who supported our reportage
and Maximus and Einar for taking me there with them. If you are thinking about going to Iceland and discover new sort of music it’s a really good idea, in the Capital city of Reykjavik there are a lot of bands that use to play live all around the city iside the bars.
I didn’t want to post a lot about the other big bands, as POSI+TIVE is supporting since the beginning the new talents, and we hope to
find other interesting festivals around the world. If you want to attend a festival and report for us the event, you can send an @mail at info@positive-magazine.com with your name, the city where you want to attend the festival and telling us something about it.
Gus Gus Video
Vicky
Dandelion seeds
The Vintage Caravan
Valdimar
