Down Is Up discusses music that falls slightly under the radar of our usual coverage: demos and self-releases, as well as output from small or overlooked labels and communities. This week, Jenn Pelly highlights a documentary about the 1980s Icelandic underground, and new videos from Spanish post-punk band Belgrado and Massachusetts punks Potty Mouth.
01 Rokk í Reykjavík - If ever you needed convincing that music thrives in isolation, this documentary film from 1982 drives the point home. Rokk í Reykjavík documents the Icelandic alternative music scene in the 1980s—a sort of Decline of Western Civilization for the land that later bred Björk and Sigur Rós. Filmed by Icelandic director Friðrik Thór Friðriksson during the winter of 1981-1982, this intriguing and often hilarious snapshot of Nordic rock was captured following the lift of a "national 'no live music' ban," according to the website of Brooklyn's Spectacle Theater (where I saw it last week, presented in association with the Icelandic Film Centre). It was a weird world in the city's small rock clubs: gothy art-rock, new wave, anarcho-punk, neo-Nazis, noise artists who behead chickens under a strobe light, and an amazing trio of crusty teenage punks who huff glue and smash guitars. But the best reason to watch this comes right at the 44:50 mark: a 16-year-old Björk fronting the peculiar, dub-tinged post-punk band Tappi Tíkarrass, dressed like a doll, banging a drum with a tennis racket while singing her huge heart out.
02 Belgrado "Jeszcze Raz" video - It's pretty indisputable that Spain has the best punk/hardcore scene in Europe right now, with the kind of bands you're only going to hear if you know how to locate the city's squats and youth houses (or certain discreet corners of the internet). But Belgrado are a bit more visible; they have a Facebook page, at least. The anarchist spirit of their razor-sharp post-punk is complemented by a charred goth streak, drawing influence from 1980s coldwave. They began in 2010 and have since released two of the better current Spanish LPs I've heard: 2011's Belgrado and 2013's Siglo XXI. The singer, Patricia, is a Warsaw native, and on Siglo she often sings in her native tongue (she also drums in another amazing post-punk band called SECT, more directly inspired by UK anarcho-punk). Belgrado's spring U.S. tour was just cancelled, but at least we've got this video, which they shared last week.
03 Potty Mouth "Black and Studs" video - A girl's bedroom is a sacred space of self-creation; it's where you shape your mind with books and records that help form your identity. In many instances, it is where you manifest a personal will to create. And maybe it is also where you put together sick outfits to wear. Potty Mouth's new video for "Black and Studs", directed and animated by Faye Orlove, celebrates all of this—it shows the band's Abby Weems, Ally Einbinder, Phoebe Harris, and Victoria Mandanas trying on outfits while spotlighting the cool stacks of feminist/punk artifacts in their rooms (copies of Please Kill Me, Girls to the Front, I Am Malala, and tapes like Nevermind, Green, Aye Nako, Patsy Cline). The song itself is about how it can be limiting to seek autonomy through punk, and the video highlights these ideas: "Misconception/ You thought you were first," Weems sings, "There's repetition/ Because our minds are cursed."