Postcards From the Reykjavik DIY Circuit

There is no venue circuit in Reykjavik in the sense that a booking agent would recognise. There are about five rooms that will say yes, one PA, one van, and a group chat of forty people who between them hold the keys to a swimming pool, a bookshop, a fish plant canteen, a garage and a lighthouse.

The PA belongs to a collective called Hljod, who bought it in 2021 and rent it out for the price of the van's diesel, which came to 6,000 kronur the weekend I was there. Everything below is what 6,000 kronur buys. I went to all five rooms in nine days in April, in weather that never once agreed with the forecast.

The swimming pool

Hlidarlaug is a municipal pool from 1937, drained since October for tile repairs the city keeps postponing. Sunneva Ragnarsdottir got the key by writing to the leisure department three times and being, in her words, "boring enough that they said yes to make it stop."

Ninety people sit on the sloping floor of the deep end. The room does the amplification: the tiled box holds a note for something close to four seconds, so the eight small speakers around the rim run at a level that would be embarrassing anywhere else. Hi-hats are useless in here. Anything long and quiet is enormous. Doors at eight, over by half ten, because Kristjan the caretaker locks the building at eleven and has never once been persuaded otherwise. Entry 3,000 kronur.

The bookshop

Kver is a secondhand shop off Laugavegur with a counter, a kettle and thirty-five people who arrive knowing they will have to stand somewhere awkward. There is no PA. There is one Grain sampler and a small guitar amp pointed into a shelf of Icelandic poetry, which turns out to be an excellent diffuser.

Dagur Palsson, who owns the shop, takes no cut of the door and does not want one. "They come at eight, they buy books at ten," he says. "Last time it was four hundred euros of books. No promoter is paying me four hundred euros." The performer keeps everything, which last month was 2,100 kronur a head from thirty-one people.

The fish plant canteen

The canteen at the Nordurvik plant in Hafnarfjordur has formica tables bolted to the floor, a serving hatch, and a smell that three people warned me about and nobody exaggerated. Elin Thorsdottir, who runs the plant's rota, books the room and sets the curfew herself: doors at eight, finished at quarter past eleven, because the first shift starts at six and roughly half the audience is on it.

The PA sits on two pallets. The ticket is 2,500 kronur and includes soup, which is not a joke about the venue - there is an urn of fish soup by the hatch and by ten it is empty. This is the only room on the circuit where the average age is over forty, and the only one where nobody films anything.

The garage

Skur 7 is a unit on an industrial estate in Kopavogur run by two siblings, Ari and Birta Steinarsdottir, who inherited the lease from an uncle's boat repair business. Sixty people, a concrete floor, and a diesel heater that has to be switched off during quiet passages because it hums somewhere around a hundred hertz and refuses to be tuned out.

The door is a coffee tin. Last year it averaged 2,100 kronur a head, and the accounts are written on the wall beside it in marker: takings, diesel, strings, a new tweeter, a taxi for a support act who missed the last bus. Nobody has ever cleared a wage from that wall and nobody pretends they are trying to.

The lighthouse

Once a year, in April, twenty-two people drive an hour out to the Hvitanes light for a set at midnight. Twenty-two is not a vibe, it is the number the stairs and the single exit will take. Power is a 2 kW generator sitting in the lee of the wall with a coat over it. This year's performer did not give a name, played for thirty-five minutes on a harmonium and a contact mic taped to the window frame, and stopped when the wind got louder than the harmonium.

Somebody recorded it on a phone in a coat pocket and sent it to the Field Recording Atlas the next day. It is mostly weather. It is also the single best thing I heard in Iceland.

Three rules hold the circuit together, none of them written down. No two nights on the same weekend, so the same two hundred people can go to everything. Whoever books the van drives the van. And every room on the circuit belongs to somebody with another job - a caretaker, a bookseller, a rota manager, a landlord's niece - which means the scene's survival depends on forty people staying on good terms with about a dozen people who could stop it tomorrow.

"People ask when we will get a proper venue," Ragnarsdottir says, sweeping the deep end. "A proper venue means rent. Rent means every Tuesday has to make money. Then we book what makes money on Tuesdays." The last bus back into town leaves at 23:32. Almost everything on this circuit ends by eleven, and it is not a coincidence.