Another eruption has started – 10 times bigger this time. After the really depressing and endless IceSave debate the volcanic eruption in South-Iceland gave us something more thrilling and uplifting to talk about (I am not kidding, people were delighted – look at the video and you will understand). The eruption went on for almost three weeks, people drove up to see it in the night under blazing northern lights. The eruption stopped exactly the morning when the long awaited national report on the banking crash was released. Then into the midst of the outrage – it started again, under the glacier this time – ten times bigger, causing flash floods and a cloud of ash in the sky – so sorry Norway and Russia – no  flights tomorrow.

When we were making Dreamland I went through lots of the 8mm films that my mother took in the 1970s and also some of the 16mm my grandfather Árni, took way back in the 1950′s. Here we are swimming in New Jersey at our grandfathers house in New Jersey, I believe in the year 1980. The big white home of the Thorbjarnarson family in the suburbs of New Jersey. We are playing with uncle John’s boa constrictor. It had also been swimming with us in the pool. Here we have Kathy Thorbjarnarson, John reading the paper while his snake is playing with the Björnstopper children -that is the children of my twin mothers, Guðrún and Kristín Björnsdottir. John the owner of the boa constrictor died of malaria in India last february. He became a specialist in the field of alligators and crocodiles, anacondas and turtles. You can read about him here in the Economist, here in the New York Times and here on my own site.

This is the first time I see a volcanic eruption. Like seeing a prehistoric creature. One curious thing is the sound. What does a volcano sound like? They are probably very different, but this is a very nice volcano. You can hear the sound a few kilometers away, like a pulse, like a heavy breath, a breathing dragon. Even in my low quality camera, the sound comes through quite close to reality. And strangely it is not overwhelming up close, a running diesel engine will ruin the acoustics. It’s very ambient, on a very human scale, but also hypnotic with the gushing red lava that the eyes see, but somehow the brain does not comprehend. Boiling rocks – they are there, the stuff stars are made of  - but you do not really understand. The volcano does not roar like thunder, it’s nothing like the power of standing by a roaring waterfall and it does not explode like fireworks or a bomb. When lava meets ice we see steamy explosions, but compared to new years eve in Reykjavik, the eruption is a relatively silent event. The volcano throws heavy molten rocks a hundred meters up into the air, but there is no bang when they land, just thumps and the pulsing strokes of bubbling molten earth. The ash sometimes falls on your head. Once in a while you will hear a heavier thump followed by a high spray of lava. The volcano has a bass like whipping woofer sound. You can hear it in in the middle of the video. The closest sound I could think of is the beat you hear from a pregnant woman’s belly. (Trust me on this I have four children). The whipping whooshing sounds as heard through the doppler device. So mother earth metaphors are not so far fetched. But the volcano is slower – not 150 beats per minute, probably closer to 50. I went up there with my friend Christopher Lund, more pictures can be seen here: www.chris.is and on the National Geographic website.

Compare for yourself here. A randomly picked doppler fetal sound on youtube.

Draumalandið – (Dreamland) the music by Valgeir Sigurðsson has been published by the Bedroom Community.

Here above you can see music samples cut to parts of the film. Valgeir Sigurðsson has made his name as an exponent of musical subtlety. As an engineer and producer, he’s often focused on the intimate, the miniature. On his solo debut Ekvílibríum, his songwriting and composition tended towards the muted or the oblique. His best-known work is punctuated with question marks and ellipses, and not so many exclamation points.

But this is only one side of his musical capabilites. Draumalandið (“Dreamland”), a documentary about the exploitation of Iceland’s natural resources, tells a story about huge things—the fortunes of a whole nation; the destruction of vast landscapes; and the global economic forces, greater still than any nation, that fuel it all—and for his soundtrack to the film, Valgeir has brought out a heavier set of tools. His entire roster of Bedroom Community labelmates contributes in some way to the creation of the score: classical composers Nico Muhly and Daníel Bjarnason, industrial wizard Ben Frost, and American folksinger Sam Amidon, along with a host of others, and the small orchestra assembled for the record swells from moments of expansive beauty into massive, surging symphonic force. Its harmonies are anxious, pulsing, driven.  

The first readers of LoveStar in Germany are finishing the book these days. Here is a nice quote from Style Magazine in Switzerland:

“Die Geschichte, die in der nahen Zukunft spielt, laviert irgendwo zwischen George Orwells “1984″, Monty Pythons Flying Circus, Douglas Adams’ “Per Anhalter durch die Galaxis” und Herzschmerzkitsch à la Nicholas Sparks. Autor Andri Snaer Magnason beweist mit LoveStar (Verlag Lübbe), dass die Nordländer nicht nur das blutige, düstere Krimi-Genre draufhaben, sondern auch das Heiter-Absurde.” – auf Anita Lehmeier. 

LoveStar has been published in German by Lubbe. Andri Snær Magnason is participating in the Leipziger Buchmesse from the 18th – 21st of March.

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February 28. 2010. Andri Snær Magnason’s Acceptance speech – at the Kairos Award Ceremony of the Alfred Toepfer Stiftung F.V.S in Hamburg. 

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, my Dear Friends, Colleagues and my Dear Family og hæ – krakkar!

I would like to thank Mr. Christoph Stolzl and Mr. Halldór Guðmundsson for their kind words and all of you for this great honour.

I you ask an Icelandic child about Hamburg the first thing that will come to it’s mind is the word game that is often played when travelling in a car: “What are you doing with the money the lady from Hamburg gave to you?”. You must answer but you may not say “yes”, “no”, “black” or “white”. So you say: I bought a car. Was it red? Indeed – it was read? Not blue ?- No… Then you are out.  So it was funny when I told my children we would actually meet the lady from Hamburg. But we had to use the money on something very special – something between yes and no, black and white. Maybe that is the real space where art lives.

But why did I take this path in life? If you ask my psychologist he would say that it is because I have two mothers – they are identical twins – that creates a very good ground for a strange mind and some complexes – a douple öedipus to deal with for example. Despite sharing the same genes and upbringing – they have opposite veiws on everything. That I might have from my mothers, the ability to see things from two correct perspectives and never quite agree with myself. 

If you would ask my brother he would blame it on Lego – I hoped I would never grow up from Lego. But later I found out that Lego is quite like language – you have prefabricated parts but can build a whole world from them. But the cool thing is that language is bigger, more bricks – and endless colors. Even an old language spoken by very few people – like Icelandic, can be used to create almost anything. And then it can be translated to German or Chinese.

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The Award ceremony  for Andri Magnason recieving the Kairos Award took place in Deutches Shauspielhaus in Hamburg the 28th of February. Here you can read speeches by Christoph Stölzl, Halldor Gudmundsson, Andri Magnason and see pictures from the ceremony on the website of the Alfred Toepfer Stiftung F.V.S. Here is more information about the Award and the people awarded by the Alfred Toepfer Stiftung:

The KAIROS Prize which was first awarded in 2007 represents an innovation within a rather distinguished post-war history of price giving through the foundation. Previous winners of prices initiated by the Alfred Toepfer Stiftung F.V.S. have been, among others, Harold Pinter, Pina Bausch, Samuel Mendes, Imre Kertesz, David Hockney, Cees Nooteboom or, more recently, Olafur Eliasson. 

The KAIROS Prize is honouring European artists and academics from the fields of the fine and the performing arts, music, architecture, film, photography, literature and journalism. The award is designed to be given above all to individuals for artistic achievements, but also to producers, festival directors, publishers or gallery owners whose activities take place outside of the public limelight – in short, to creative personalities who give important impulses to art and culture in Europe.

The KAIROS Prize is endowed with the amount of 75.000 € and aims to honour outstanding individuals working with entrepreneurial spirit, persistence and creativity in the field of European culture and intercultural understanding. The prize is named after the Greek god KAIROS –  the god for “the right moment” –  as it seeks to encourage and promote younger artists, curators, managers in the field of culture or science at “the right time in their career”. It is neither an award for life time achievement nor a singular project, but rather seeks to identify early achievement, special work in progress as well as potential for future sucess.

The KAIROS Prize is awarded annually in Hamburg by the Alfred Toepfer Stiftung F.V.S. An independent committtee decides on the awarding.

 Committee of the KAIROS Prize

Christoph Stölzl, (chairman) historian, politician and senator retd

Christine Eichel, author and journalist

Nike Wagner, art director of the Weimar Arts Festival “pèlerinages”

Armin Conrad, editor-in-chief at 3sat kulturzeit

Rainer M. Schaper, director of the culture department of Swiss television and member of the executive board 

Andri Snær Magnason at the Leipziger Buchmesse – March 19th – 21st 2010.

March 19: Crisis – what crisis? 

The Leipzig Book Fair has traditionally focused its attention on the presentation of central and eastern European countries. For this year’s “Authorial Special”, organised by the Book Fair in cooperation with the Berlin Literary Colloquium, the headline title is “Crisis! What Crisis?”. All over the world, the much-quoted financial and economic crisis has led to high unemployment, company and national bank bankruptcies and above all, to great uncertainty. Six European writers – Friedrich Christian Delius (Germany), Andri Snær Magnason (Iceland), László Földényi (Hungary), Eugenijus Ališanka (Lithuania), Georgi Gospodinov (Bulgaria) and Natalja Kljuetscharowa (Russia) – have been invited to write an essay on their own experiences in this crisis and to read it in public for the first time at the Book Fair. They will be describing entirely personal impacts, but also the social effects.

Venue: Café Europa, Hall 4 Stand D505. Germany’s Federal Foreign Office is again providing funding in 2010 for the “Authorial Special”.

02/19/2010: Nicht erst seit dem Kinostart der Millenium-Trilogie von Stieg Larsson ist skandinavische Literatur hierzulande beliebter Lesestoff. Die Botschaften und Kulturinstitute der Länder Finnland, Schweden, Norwegen, Dänemark und Island organisieren gemeinsam das “Nordische Forum” (Halle 4, Stand C304) auf der Leipziger Buchmesse. 
In der NaTo wird am 19. März ab 19.00 Uhr die “5. Nordische Literaturnacht” veranstaltet. Der isländische Schriftsteller Andri Snær Magnason liest aus seinem Thriller “LoveStar”. Weitere anwesende Autoren sind unter anderem Åsa Linderborg, Michael Katz Krefeld und Olli Jalonen.

LoveStar – a novel by Andri Snær Magnason has been published by Lubbe in Germany. Here you can see the cover, “retro-sci-fi-flash gordon soft porn style”. It actually fits the book quite well. LoveStar is about a huge corporation based on a north atlantic island and becomes a global giant. You could say that LoveStar is about what would have happened to the world if the crisis had not stopped our global expansion. Here you can read some excerpts in German on the Lubbe website. LoveStar did very well when it was published here in Iceland, it was nominated to the Icelandic literary award and it won the DV literary prize. Now it has been staged by Herranott – the oldest theater group in Iceland. What is LoveStar? When I wrote the book I thought of the books I had loved the most, by Bulgakof, Calvino, Primo Levi, Vonnegut and others, not quite science fiction – but on the edge, twisted reality. 

Andri will participate in the Leipziger Buchmesse 2010 from the 18th – the 21st of march. Andri Snær Magnason just won the Kairos award of the Alfred Toepfer institute in Hamburg. Here is some information in German about Lovestar.

My childrens book – Die Geshichte auf dem blauen planeten – has also been published in German. It won the Icelandic literary prize in the year 2000 and has been published in 20 languages. Here you can read about in on Radio Bremen.