One of the biggest festival for visual art and music, the Punto Raya, was held in Reykjavik on the last weekend of January.
Held in Harpa concert hall, you could feel the new art floating in the air.
Here people wanted to see something new, something progressive.
They got what they came for.
The darkness of the dim-lit Silfurberg room in Harpa, heavy, deep and strange sounds blended with a great variety of visual art were the salient themes.
The festival opened with audiovisual concert, the premiere of two pieces.
The first piece, Triptych Unfolding, by Bret Battey and Hugi Gudmundsson
shook the dim-lit Silfurberg room, filling up the walls with visual piece
under a thundering dark soundscape generated from computers and midi keyboards
accompained with a grand piano.
The artwork started pitch black but slowly evolved into all kinds of forms
following some complicated pattern. After it, everyone turned their chairs around to see Sigurdur Gudjonsson´s and Anna Thorvaldsdottir´s Trajectories. Darker and heavier bass
driven music started again and on the screens we saw closeup take of a pile of sand moving in rhythm with the music flavoured by a grand piano played live by Anna.
I felt as if the pieces showed, in their own way, the birth and the development of something like the world and the earth through thousands of years.
So this was the tone of the festival. Dark and artistic atmosphere.
Combustion by RKD kept to this theme. The piece comprised of a strong light flashing in the dark room with loads of smoke steaming into the room. The light flashed through the smoke and it took on all kinds of forms, giving me clues how green and purple clouds will look like in a post-nuclear world.
The high point of the festival was Ryoji Ikeda´s concert Datamatics [ver.2.0],
the second concert in his Datamatics-series. It was a crazy blend of something I have never seen before. This was electric computer-generated visual music piece to the extreme.
Computers ran data of hard drive errors and astronomy in various sequences. Each piece of data was reflected with a sound which ultimately made up the soundtrack. The result was a
computer-generated imagery of a whole world made up of tiny dots under this strange and uncontrolled electro sound. One moment the high pitched noises invaded your ears and the next deep and dark bass took over.
All in all, the Punto y Raya is a good addition to the evergrowing flora of festivals in Iceland. It´s a great choice for people craving something new and fresh in our world of ever repeated popsongs.
Hrafnkell Már Einarsson
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