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The Reykjavík Grapevine Issue 8 — 2015
Everything is dark and I have to put it in. So, even if I try to hide this side of myself, it just comes pointless and terrible through. The colours, they always come back.” The same is true of Steinunn’s dayWhilst her approach seems to shine to-day life. “I once met a friend that with playful, carefree creativity, a hadn’t been very good to me,” she shadow passes over Steinunn’s face frowns. “I decided for a as she explains that week that if I met that “I am sometimes there’s more to both friend, I was not going her work and her to smile. But I met the really, really sad. personality than friend, and of course, Darkness does come that. “People often straight away I was into my work. It’s say to me, ‘I wish I smiling. And I thought, had your life! You are ‘Ugh! I hate myself! part of the drive always so happy!’” Why couldn’t I stop behind it… to get she says. “But that’s smiling, just once in my away from the dark. really not how it is. life!’” I am sometimes reDJ flugvél og geim- Because everything ally, really sad. I get skip’s visual universe is dark and pointless melancholy. Darkalso includes a lot of and terrible. Then ness does come into fractals: repeating patmy work. It’s part of terns of shapes that you try to find a way the drive behind it… can be zoomed into to make it fun to the drive to get away infinitely. “Fractals keep living.” from the dark. Beare just. So. Beauticause everything is ful,” says Steinunn, emphatically. “I dark and pointless and terrible. Then don’t know what they do really, but you try to find a way to make it fun to I’ve heard they’re used to make comkeep living.” puter games and special effects, and “Often I feel like life is a really people say they appear everywhere in terrible thing, and evil, and so I get nature. And now, I can make them in attracted to evil things,” she continmy computer, with a fractal generaues. “Then I think, how can I live in tor, where I just put in numbers, and this world? How can I possibly keep then it comes out very beautiful. And on living? And should I? And I’ll also really pointless. I make them for think, no, I shouldn’t, it’s all too bad, hours and hours, and then just watch I’m not good, the world is evil. Then this one-minute clip that came from I’ll be walking around and thinking it. It doesn’t serve any purpose. It’s about all this, and I’ll see something totally meaningless. And that is my beautiful. Maybe it’s some song comgoal in my life. I want to do pointless ing from a window. And it makes you things or things that you can’t tell are want to hear more… that’s one of the important. I don’t enjoy these eating, things that makes you want to conworking, sleeping things.” tinue living. Beautiful songs from the radio.” Whilst such existential questions are something many push to the back of their mind, or ignore completely,
Steinunn seems to wrestle with them on a day-to-day basis. “The most important question in my life,” she says, “and in everyone’s life, I think, is, ‘Why should I keep living? Why don’t I just die?’ And for me, it’s about living for more than the things we HAVE to do—the eating, sleeping, working. It’s not like we’re farmers—we’re not growing the crops and tending the animals, just to stay alive. Well, many of us aren’t, at least. So now, people get really sad and think, ‘Why am I living?’” Steinunn posits that it’s ‘nonessential’ activities, like music and the arts, that can offer a route out of the mundane. “People can find something else they like to do,” she says. “Some hobby, maybe. And other people say, ‘Why do you spend your time in this pointless thing?’ But the pointless thing is actually what keeps them going! For me it’s these things I like— the beautiful colours and lights, music and art, books… especially books where I don’t really learn anything, just books about something.”
First band on the moon Being DJ flugvél og geimskip has given Steinunn the chance to maintain a creativity-focussed life. She travels more and more, whether representing Iceland at the music industry festival Eurosonic, or flying out to Japan late last year to take part in J-pop and Kpop music workshops. “This was always my dream,” she smiles, “to be a musician and an artist, and to have my picture in the paper and say, ‘Yep, that’s me!’, and to travel the world and play my music for people. Because I like the music I do, so maybe my music can find its way to other people, and make them happy
and want to continue living too! So my dream has become reality. Someone asked me, ‘What are you going to do when you grow up?’ and I said, ‘Be a musician and an artist!’ And then I realised, ‘Oh! That’s actually what I do!’ and I was really happy.” But she has greater ambitions still. “I want to play my music for all the people who would like to listen to it,” she says. “When I hear new music at a festival, I feel so happy and excited, and I think, ‘Wow, what more does the world have to offer?’ So I want to do the same, for as many people as I can. First, everyone on Earth. And then, of course, to play in space. I can’t go yet though, because it’s still very expensive, and I’m not a scientist doing some experiments...” In the meantime, Steinunn’s imagination contains more than enough to
keep her busy here on Earth. At the same time, the philosophy underlying her work shows that playfulness and lightness are, sometimes, things to be taken very seriously. “So, yes,” she finishes, “it’s all about getting towards the light. Sometimes I meet people in the street, and I’m wearing black clothes, and they say, ‘Oh no, Steinunn... you are wearing all black, what’s wrong?’ And I say, ‘Nothing at all! I’m finally happy!’ So, if you see me wearing black clothes, don’t worry. It’s a very GOOD sign!”
PLEASED TO MEAT YOU!