SEEN AND HEARD: SÓLSTAFIR — “BLAKKRAKKI”

Photo by Katie Metcalfe

(written by Islander)

This is the shortest SEEN AND HEARD roundup I’ve ever published, so short that it doesn’t make any meaningful dent in the volume of new songs and videos I’ll be wading through in preparation for the usual Saturday NCS column. I suppose pinning up just one critter doesn’t even qualify as a “roundup”.

But I have what I think is a very good reason for shining our faint spotlight on just one song and video today as the week ends.

We’re not too far away (just a couple of months or less) from the beginning of our site’s annual year-end LISTMANIA extravaganza. The focus is always on the year’s best records, as chosen by our own staff, various guests, and a few sites with a lot bigger reach than our own, plus my own rollout of especially infectious songs.

What we don’t do is compile a list of the year’s best videos, not because it wouldn’t be fun to do that but because who the hell has the time to keep track of the possibilities as the year rolls on? Certainly not I.

But I think if I were to have done that, Sólstafir‘s new video for their song “Blakkrakki” (“The Black Dog”) would be on a very short list of the year’s best.

To put my cards on the table, I am an Iceland-o-phile. I’ve been fortunate to visit the country a handful of times, each trip organized around Ascension Fest or its predecessor Oration Fest, and I’ve loved every visit. I’m also fascinated by the country’s unique history, language, and culture.

To further confess my possible biases, I’ve also been a big fan of Sólstafir dating back to that band’s earliest days. As their music has significantly evolved, their popularity has swelled to volcanic proportions, though they are still unmistakably an Icelandic band, even if you wouldn’t any longer place them under the vaunted banner of “Icelandic black metal” (or at least not as often as you might have once done).

But I think the following video will exert a strong appeal even to people who don’t know much or think much about Iceland or have little or no familiarity with Sólstafir, because it’s just so wild.

Basically, as you will see (if you haven’t already), the band set up on a flat-bed trailer and played through the song while being pulled by a truck around Reykjavik and less inhabited places – including being pulled at highway speeds with other vehicles whizzing by them in the other direction.

It’s pretty obvious from the video that the bandmembers weren’t tied down to avoid being pitched off, which is part of the thrill that comes from watching this. (I’m guessing their vehicle’s insurance didn’t cover this excursion, nor any other insurance.)

I can verify that there are police in Iceland, though I’ve never seen any out in the hinterlands. I do wonder how the band, their driver, and the people who made the video managed to complete this without getting stopped. Or maybe they did get stopped?

I also wonder why the drummer Hallgrímur didn’t have at least one spare drumstick. 🙂

Part of what makes the video so engaging are the sceneries visible around the band as they truck along. It does give you a taste of what makes the country so beautiful. And, as always, the band is also very cool-looking.

P.S.: This wouldn’t have been as much fun if they’d filmed it in the winter.

Oh yeah… there’s the music too! If the song were ho-hum, it probably would have made the video seem drab, notwithstanding everything about it that’s wild. But the song is definitely not ho-hum. It’s a vividly throbbing, hard-rocking, vividly ringing and slashing romp, completed by Aðalbjörn Tryggvason‘s one-of-a-kind vocals and a blazing solo. It will get your muscles twitching, and it’s catchy as hell, but it’s also got some darkness in it too — it is named “Blakkrakki” for a reason.

And with that, I’ll leave you to the video. Below it I’ve included extensive commentary by Bowen Staines, director for Don’t Panic Films, who made the film. The song, by the way, is from Sólstafir‘s new album Hin Helga Kvöl, which will be released on November 8 via Century Media Records.

Statement by Bowen Staines

“Regarding the production of the new music video for ‘Blakkrakki,’ this is actually the fifth video that I’ve been lucky enough to do with SÓLSTAFIR.

“This particular idea for a future video (which would ultimately become ‘Blakkrakki’) came to Addi and I maybe four or five years ago, when we discussed the possibility of putting everybody on a flatbed trailer, and then just drifting the thing around the runways at the Reykjavík Airport and shooting the whole thing in a single take. And so we put that idea onto the shelf for a few years until I heard a very early demo for ‘Blakkrakki’ almost four years ago at SÓLSTAFIR’s rehearsal space in Seltjarnarnes, the same day I asked them to learn ‘Dionysus’ at three-times the normal speed for the video we’d shoot for that song the next day. And I remember looking at Addi, and being like ‘I want to do THIS one!’ Four years later (but also, only a few weeks ago), the guys were playing the song while standing on a flatbed trailer doing sixty miles per hour on a stretch of highway surrounded on all sides by one of the oldest lava flows in Iceland.

“From a filmmaking standpoint, I opted to include shots that revealed the cameras, crew and our driver, Lexi, because I felt that it was really important to share that part of the process, as well as the teamwork that made this video happen in a single day. By comparison, both ‘Fjara’ and ‘Bláfjall’ had 60+ pages of shotlists, took nearly four months to shoot, and then another five or six months to edit… while ‘Blakkrakki’ was shot in a single day, and then edited over the following twenty-one — making this the fastest I have ever shot and edited a music video in my entire career. All of the camera movements and transitions were done 100% in-camera: there are no key-frames, digital fades or any motion paths, and as such, almost zero post-production.

“The most fun part of shooting the video was that everything was done totally guerrilla-style: active roads and highways, with the only items consistently strapped down being the cabs, amp heads, and the priceless Ludwig drumkit from 1963 that we BORROWED from a personal friend of the band… ‘Careful’ just doesn’t quite say it. Thankfully, the only thing that eventually/inevitably fell off was one of the Orange amp heads and one of Hallgrímur’s drumsticks, for which he had to run all the way back to find amongst the infinite expanses of highway, moss and lava far behind us.

“That being said, there was a point after we had done a dozen or so takes and had gotten comfortable with everyone being on the flatbed, where we found our way onto this huge stretch of road called Keilir and began hitting speeds upwards of fifty to sixty miles per hour — and every time a large truck passed us, you can actually see some of the cymbals flexing in a few of the shots that made it into the final video — as well as a couple really quick clips of some of us almost falling off the side while going up a steep switchback incline near Þingvellir.

“The final step was to transfer the whole video onto Super16mm film, so that it has a very organic, weighty feel to it. So yeah, this whole video was transferred directly onto reel-to-reel 16mm film, proving once again that the format is NOT dead! All in all, ‘Blakkrakki’ was a blast to make, and we hope you have fun watching it, too.”

https://solstafir-band.lnk.to/HinHelgaKvol
https://www.facebook.com/solstafirice
https://www.instagram.com/solstafir_official