You told me eight years ago that Reykjavik is “the city of fear”, which was supposed to be a joke, as nothing ever happens there, according to you. Is that still true?
When we were laughing at that remark, I was a teenager. We were listening to gangsta rap, like NWA and Ice-T, and, by comparison, Reykjavik felt more paralysed than sleepy – that’s when we coined the term ‘Reykjavik, the city of fear’ because nothing ever happened here. Unfortunately, a lot has changed. You could say Reykjavik was a child then, and now it’s a teenager, with all the hormonal imbalances that implies, and it’s still nowhere even close to grown up – it’s taken a darker turn, with drugs and tourism, and social media being some of the main contributors. The thing about Reykjavik is that it’s a small town with big international connections, so big changes happen very fast here, and in a dramatic way; everything is on the surface all the time, so you notice changes really fast. Rent and real estate prices went through the roof more or less overnight due to tourism and Airbnb. You sometimes walk into a barren supermarket because nine tourist buses came by and emptied out everything, as if some kind of weird, apocalyptic, biblical locust plague just passed through there. We never had that in the past.
They are also manically building ugly new houses everywhere; the city is changing super fast, so the very cityscapes you grew up with have changed a lot, both physically and psychologically. It’s totally unrecognisable as the place where I grew up. Then the opioid crisis started killing young people in bigger numbers than ever before, which seems to happen overnight as well. And then there is social media. It has given every crazy asshole in the country a platform and a voice, bullshit extremist attitudes have found their way to germinate and pollute the national discourse – it’s one of many new American plagues. Before, these voices were mostly isolated and lonely men angrily barking into their booze or at the TV; now, they are forming vigilante groups patrolling the streets on the weekends and pretending to be guarding the population from criminal ‘foreign’ people, while being criminals themselves. That’s just one example; you can see the strange effects of social media everywhere. It’s the mirror we can’t stand looking into, a real Pandora’s box. All of a sudden, we can worry about all the world’s problems at once, it’s mind-altering stuff – it’s the same crap as everywhere else, I guess ?
Still, I find it all rather boring, there’s not much for a creatura mundis like myself up here. That is why Horde is a must – we have to make our own things, to make it lovable. I guess that’s why you have so much music coming from Iceland: isolation, nine-month winter, and boredom. That is the situation with Reykjavik, the city, but not with creativity – that’s on fire.
How does it feel, being back home on your native Ísland after being gone for almost ten years, living and working on mainland “European battlefields”?
I have been back for quite a while now, but it still feels kinda unreal because I’m not certain where I landed. The country I left has changed so many times over while I was away, and it keeps changing, I lost a big chapter of Icelandic cultural history, and the connection with the people here, connections that should have been formed in that period, are still not formed in my life. I had built a life in Brussels and thought that was it. When that ended, I had to start from scratch again in a society that I did not recognise. Then there was also the economic crash of 2008, that was a big trauma to the national soul, and a changing factor – it altered the fabric of the society, in ways no one could ever have even imagined. I was in Belgium when that happened, I did not think I would ever move back here, and when my life in Europe detonated, I did.
I thought I would just come over for a bit of a rest, but Iceland has a strange gravity of its own, and people feel its tug when the time has come to come back. I have heard that over and over again, from Icelanders and foreigners alike. It made me believe that I had been ‘returned’ for a reason, and that has certainly been proven true in my case. There was no tourism to speak of when I went into exile, and now it’s the main theme of the society, making us the natives a strange kind of B class citizens – so it’s all up in the air, with no direction or control or foreseeable conclusion in sight, so I feel like a bit like stranger in a strange land. And I’m kind of turned on by it all. I feel like I’m in the place I should be, I see some kind of opportunity in all this restlessness, the kind you can only experience when things are not carved in stone. Iceland is a very young place in that regard – not burdened by thousands of years of tradition or a super heavy national identity, like Italy, for example, with their stupendous achievements already in place from the ancient world onwards, casting a long shadow onto the future. I’m excited and motivated to be back in this flipped version of the script.
Why the name, Horde? What does this collective noun signify to you?
It implies a lot of people, a Horde in fact, and I liked that. It’s not a setup in the traditional sense of a band, I think of it as a clan or a tribe of like-minded people. We are not high school friends who formed a band while still studying – that’s the classic or romantic version of a rock ‘n’ roll band. We are souls who, for reasons unknown to us, have crossed paths, and in the wake of that created something vibrant and alive. I started Horde when I was still living in Brussels; suddenly, there was this strange calling to make music again. I had been in a band when I was much younger, and I had been touched by the music, and when that happens, they say it never leaves you. I was working as a visual artist when all of a sudden, these old songs I had taken with me from Iceland to Europe, to my surprise, started banging very loudly on the door. By that time, I had been working as a visual artist for a very long time. I felt the need to collaborate, I was also in close proximity to theatremakers and that was a big school for me.
I was contemplating what to do with the songs when my friend Teuk suggested we should do a totally unrelated music performance in the Bozar museum in Brussels – and we did. After that, there was no turning back, he saw the music in me before I did, and I’m very grateful to him for turning me back on. So, I decided to take these songs further, and one thing lead to another, and then I was demoing them with my friends Johan and Aurelien, and we were going to make a band – we even had some label interest. Then my life exploded, I went through a painful separation with my long-term partner, and decided to go back to Reykjavik to rest and repair. And then, strangely enough, that process started again and I decided to not only finish the demos we had started, but to make an album and continue with friends here In Reykjavik.
How long was Horde in the making?
My whole life (laughter), or so it seems; I have sketches and song ideas going as far back as 2001. Horde was always there, behind everything else I was doing, like some dark passenger. I see that now, silently taking form. I now know that I was not ready for this kind of thing before, but now I am. I have been harvesting experiences my whole life to give birth to this thing. I’m very much inspired by Richard Wagner’s idea of the ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ or the ‘total artwork’– a work of art that incorporates all the artistic mediums into one whole. In our day and age, several new mediums have been added – the online part alone has been massive. I also have all my creative endeavours, methods and disciplines to put in there. I’m finally in a place to bring them all together under a single name, and share my findings with others, to create something that has a life of its own, the third mind. I’m trained as a mixed-media artist and I’m a Gemini, so I guess this kind of mess comes natural to me. I’m being true to that idea. Horde has all kinds of potentialities still not realised, sculptures, videos, performances – that’s where we are now, videos and live performance.
How does Horde attract its members since you describe it as “an ever-changing and living organism”? What’s the telltale sign that someone is going to be a great addition?
The telltale sign is that they immediately connect with the core of it. After I came to Iceland and decided to finish the record, everyone I asked to contribute, except one person, immediately said yes. I was so honoured and moved by that, it felt like a real homecoming. The way we worked was that I came up with the skeletons of the songs and then friends would add the rest, so it’s a real collaboration. I then produced it with my friend Dóri. There are some serious players from the Icelandic music scene on this record, from many different musical disciplines. The fire is bright. I wanted to take it further, but at the time, I was not sure where the road would take me, it was not at all visible to me – and is still not, in many regards. I had no idea how this would turn out: was it a visual arts installation? Was it a record that would go on unnoticed in some dusty corner of the internet, was I losing my mind? What was it?
All I knew was that I had spent a lot of energy, money, and passion on it, and now I had this beautiful diamond in my hands, or so I believed, that I had conjured up out of the ether. Then I thought, since I have still some songs to record, maybe I’ll just get a gang together and keep recording. And in that spirit, I played a couple of songs to my drummer friend Erling and asked him if he would be interested in recording drums for the next record, and he jumped on it and said that we need to play this to people. He had the fire and connected on the spot, it was like a breath of fresh air.
I had been carrying this heavy secret for years and then boom – I thought, ‘yeah, let’s form a rock ‘n’ roll band and blow shit up.’ Then I met Thoracius, whom I had known for years, but not in this context, so I asked him and sent him the record. He went boom on it as well. During our first songwriting session together, we wrote the B-side to the first single, a 9:43-minute piece of music in four days. We based it on an old recording I had. We recorded mixes and finished for mastering in less than a week: it’s called ‘All for the love of Djehuti’. Then he suggested the bass player and bang – that’s where we are now. Inevitably, the focus started to shift towards live performance, but we’ll see what happens, one must always leave an open space for cosmic interventions – fun times ahead…
In your press kit, you said that upon returning to Iceland, you “called on the ancient pagan space gods of your nation”. How does this manifest in your work?
I was advised to make an electronic press kit, something I had never done before. I was told that the language of it should be a bit fanciful, you know, a bit of ‘show bizz’ – ‘ancient space gods’ was my idea of that. But now this interview is getting very interesting and very hard to answer at the same time. When I beached up on these shores, I had nothing inside me, my whole life had gone up in flames. I was a void spectre devoid of direction or purpose, I then asked for purpose and got answered with Horde. There are mythological references throughout the record and throughout my art practice, dating all the way back to my childhood. I have a keen interest in the great mystery of life. There are forces at play in our lives far greater than us – I’ll leave it at that.
Which God are you asking in the debut single? What are they like to you? Benevolent? Indifferent?
I’m referring to the living soul of the universe; the song is a kind of prayer for the love and the strength needed for this life, and I suppose it’s a prayer for the love I did not have in my life when I wrote those lyrics. The song has Old Testament references, as well as the playing cards, you know, hearts and spades; there is a desire to find your kind, running through the song as an undercurrent. It’s written from the perspective of someone a bit battered by life, a young but world-weary point of view. The Gods to me are all things at all times…
What’s the near and distant future for Horde? What direction would you like to take it?
The objective is to take Horde to its natural conclusion, even if that takes me the rest of my life. But in the short-term future, I’d say to perform music live here and abroad, to create a live experience with projections and lights, to build a good body of work, to hopefully create something of lasting beauty for the world, and then leave it for those who seek. To, perhaps, inspire others to fight this hard for what they too have inside them. I think that’s a nice idea. One should try to improve the world while passing through it, not only take, make it a better place. It’s in dire need of dreamers, rebels, poets, and visionaries, who can see further than the appalling nightmare-tech horseshit future we are being asked to accept as our lives. I, for one, will never do that. Perhaps we are the noble savages of the 21st century. We love the world and humanity, we think it deserves better.
The idea is that we are not powerless, and we refuse to be at the mercy of a system that hates us – find the others!
ABOUT HORDE / Horde is an international rock ‘n’ roll collective based in Reykjavik, Iceland. In it, Palli seeks to collaborate with other artists to create a space blending his audio and visual arts practice, and to combine his various artistic mediums into a single point of focus, a place where he can write lyrics or poems as well as direct videos, sing and play the various instruments, while building the language of images to accompany the music of Horde. The project could be described as a collaborative platform where ideas can be exchanged between the various musicians and artists involved. It is an ever-changing and living organism that has its own aesthetic and style. It’s from this alchemical experiment that the music is extracted. The members of Horde are free to come and go, and most have other bands or musical outlets to work with, so there’s a certain freshness, or sense of adventure to the musical elements involved. The record has contributions from musicians from bands such as Singapore Sling, Sólstafir, HAM, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, The Dead Skeletons, Fufanu, Café Neon, The Third Sound, and Just Another Snake Cult to name a few.
