Nick Miners Photography

A few shots from Ice­land, away from the Air­waves festival.

Well I just had the most insane time in Ice­land at the 2011 Ice­land Air­waves fest­ival in Reyk­javík. The pho­to­graphs are all for the 405 so please go there for day-​​by-​​day reviews of the fest­ival itself; how­ever here are some pho­tos of the many acts we saw dur­ing the cra­zi­est 5 days in Ice­land I have ever witnessed.

Tomor­row I shall be step­ping on a plane with Tim Boddy and James Can­ham from The 405 with the aim of cov­er­ing as much as pos­sible of the 2011 Ice­land Air­waves fest­ival in Reyk­javík. This fest­ival began as a one-​​night event in an aero­plane hanger in 1999 and has expan­ded to become one of the most pop­u­lar fest­ivals on the calendar.

This year the fest­ival runs from 12^th-​​16^th Octo­ber, with around 250 artists play­ing at 10 ven­ues and numer­ous off-​​venue events, often until around 4:00 in the morn­ing. Need­less to say we are all explod­ing with excite­ment at the pro­spect, and will do our best to bring you reviews and pho­to­graphs of some of the best new bands from Ice­land and bey­ond, as well as spe­cial cov­er­age of one of Björk’s Bio­philia per­form­ances in the city’s brand new opera house, Harpa.

Stay tuned for sneaky peeks at some of the pho­to­graphs, and keep an eye on the 405 for pre­views, artist inter­views and live reviews through­out the festival.

The organ­isers of Ice­land Air­waves held a spe­cial event in Lon­don last night as a pre­lude to the main event in Octo­ber. Daniel Águst’s elec­tronic prac­ti­tion­ers Gus­Gus were joined by Hjaltalín’s Högni Egils­son on the stage, sup­por­ted by Denmark’s Rep­tile and Retard and their amaz­ing hair. I squeezed in next to the stage on a hot, sweaty even­ing at Brick Lane’s 93 Feet East to get these pics for The 405.

I can sense it -
Some­thing import­ant
Is about to happen

If asked, I would find it impossible to name a favour­ite album, as the answer changes based on my mood, the weather, and the time of day. But there’s no doubt in my mind as to the most import­ant album, one which has argu­ably shaped the very per­son I am today.

In the sum­mer hol­i­day of 1993, dur­ing the hey­day of ITV’s music video show ‘The Chart Show’, my atten­tion was caught by an unusual sight. A young Icelandic singer was fret­ting about the odd things humans do, whilst walk­ing through a bizarre fake forest with assor­ted pup­pet anim­als. And what a voice! I was fas­cin­ated, and in those days, when MP3 down­loads were but a twinkle in the vir­tual eye of a nas­cent inter­net, I had to sat­isfy my curi­os­ity in the only way pos­sible, by pur­chas­ing a CD of Björk’s ‘Debut’ when it was released.

The album was a first for me in sev­eral ways. Trivi­ally, it was my first CD, but more import­antly, it planted in me the seed of my obses­sion with Ice­land and Icelandic music. Here was this girl from a strange land that to most people only exis­ted as a blob on school geo­graphy maps, and whose cap­ital city had an exotic name, com­ing out with some of the most com­pel­ling and ori­ginal music I had heard for years. Until that time my choices of listen­ing had (to my eternal shame) sailed with the winds of pop­u­lar taste; Sting, Annie Len­nox, Mike Old­field, to name but a few; and it took this album to make me real­ise there was so much more out there.

In 1999, 6 years after Björk screeched and wailed her way into our lives (well, those of us who were unfa­mil­iar with The Sug­ar­cubes), I trav­elled to Ice­land for the first time, with my part­ner and our 6-​​month-​​old son, and I was bewitched. I returned to Ice­land as often as time—and my wallet—would allow. Con­fron­ted by scenes such as this, how could I help but redis­cover my love of photography?

Gull­foss, the Golden Falls

Twit­ter, the microb­log­ging ser­vice, and object of the deri­sion of many of the less forward-​​thinking mem­bers of the tra­di­tional press, also had a major part to play in the immin­ent com­ple­tion of an 18 year long per­sonal cycle. A set of black and white images from Iceland’s west­ern fjords region, which I took in May 2009, was extremely well received, and shared by sev­eral people, both within and out­side Ice­land, mak­ing it my most pop­u­lar gal­lery of pho­to­graphs to date. By main­tain­ing links with the people who had pub­li­cised my images, I gained a small but grow­ing net­work of friends who shared a pas­sion for, or lived in, Iceland.

The res­ult­ant increased pro­file of my work brought me to the atten­tion of Coun­ter­feit magazine, a music web­site based in Shef­field, who were look­ing for some pho­to­graphs of a London-​​based, Sheffield-​​born rap­per called The Ruby Kid for an inter­view they were pub­lish­ing. After com­plet­ing the shoot I star­ted ask­ing around to see if there were any other web­sites like Coun­ter­feit, but more local to me, for whom I could do sim­ilar work. The amaz­ing net­work­ing power of the Inter­net brought me to The 405, where I was given the oppor­tun­ity to gain free entry (via photo passes) to end­less gigs in Lon­don to shoot for reviews or photo-​​only ‘In Pic­tures’ features.

It wasn’t long before I real­ised that we could do some­thing par­tic­u­larly spe­cial at The 405 (that’s not to belittle the great work it was already doing), so I sug­ges­ted try­ing for passes to the annual Ice­land Air­waves fest­ival in Octo­ber, with a view to pub­lish­ing a fea­ture focus­ing on the fest­ival as a whole. The edit­or­ial team were all in favour of the idea and, once again through Twitter’s net­work, I was put in touch with the press officer for the fest­ival, who agreed to issue three passes to us. Only a week or so later, it was announced that there would be two spe­cial per­form­ances dur­ing the fest­ival at Reykjavík’s recently com­pleted opera house, Harpa, by none other than the one per­son who is still Iceland’s most fam­ous export: Björk Guðmundsdóttir.

And so I find myself on the brink of an adven­ture that will bring together the holy trin­ity of music, pho­to­graphy and the magical island of Ice­land, and I can trace it all back to one single, cir­cu­lar piece of foil and plastic, imprin­ted with the DNA of my life as it is today.