theartsdesk in Reykjavík: Iceland Airwaves 2011

Iceland is remote. Strategic too. Vikings stopped off there on the way to North America. It hosted the Reagan-Gorbachev summit 25 years ago. On the anniversary, visitors from America, Canada and across continental Europe are in Reykjavík for the 13th annual Iceland Airwaves. Over its five days the festival brings an extraordinary range of music to Iceland’s capital. Three years on from the country’s financial meltdown, Iceland remains strategic. Culturally strategic.

Reykjavík, though, is small. Walking from the dockside to the fringes of the built-up area takes 20 minutes. The city's streets are narrow. Ten cars cause a traffic jam. Among those will be four or five four-by-fours, a legacy of pre-crash Iceland. Along the dockside things open out, allowing less cramped development. A large hole beside the new Harpa arts complex will presumably become the site of something else world-class.

The disconnect between the festival's scale (any given moment sees 13 shows) and where it's held is echoed by Reykjavík’s townscape. Low-rise buildings clad in the dusty colours of a natural environment huddle side by side with blocky edifices that feel as though they belong in Stevenage or some other post-Le Corbusier conurbation. There’s little middle ground between them. The smaller buildings could fit in anywhere with an economy reliant on fishing or the sea, maybe Westcliff-on-Sea or Bergen.

That's not all that knocks you off balance. A nine-hour coach trip nibbling into the interior of the island brings geysers, basalt cliffs, extinct volcanoes, ravens that spookily reply when called to and the gash in the surface of the Earth where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates meet (pictured below). At the spectacular Gullfoss waterfall, visitors seek sanctuary in the mist which surrounds it. Of course, Icelanders are used to their natural and built environments, but the extreme contrast between the two requires more than a double take.

Sudden five-minute hailstorms don’t help. Nor does a knock-you-horizontal wind that appears from nowhere. A blue sky dumps torrential rain. Icelanders have no use for umbrellas and power down Reykjavík’s main street Laugavegur without head cover. While queuing to get into shows, you wish you shared Icelanders’ phlegm.