In talking about this concert, I don’t really know where to start. But I think I’ll say firstly that this church, Óháði söfnuðurinn, in the east part of Reykjavik, is a place that means so much to me. I was here the first time in 2018. I got to meet Thorir Baldursson and he showed me the beautiful black Hammond B3 that the church owns. Since then, this church has been somewhat of a “ground zero” on Iceland to me. Each time I plan a trip I the first thing I check is whether this church is available for a concert or other event. Me and Thorir also really connected, both on a musical and personal level. Even so that I adopted him as my Icelandic grandpa. And he accepted! He couldn’t attend the concert but came by the church earlier so I got to show him the setup. I always cherish meeting him. It brightens the day and warms your heart.
Last time I was here I had almost a religious experience when, on my way to my concert, there was a rainbow ending exacly in the church. It inspired me to name the concert “Where the rainbow ends”, and the theme would be all the wonderful things you could find at the end of the rainbow. I also had an idea and a wish to do parts of my quadraphonic concert. This would be the perfect place in introduce this concept on Iceland. Though, I had to figure out a way to do it without my usual setup of 4 leslies, using “only” one. After doing some expermients at the HQ I was concvinced that it would be possible to do some of it using a miced leslie and a couple of PA speakers.
Luckily I got access to the church already on Thursday so I could start rigging and testing. I managed to borrow 2 different PA systems that I put up on each side of the room. It took a while to fine tune it, to make the speakers sounding equal to a leslie and eliminate resonances and feedback. But more and more I felt I recognized the soundscape and I realized that I would be able to do even more of the quadraphonic repertoire than I had hoped for.
So, the idea for the whole concert changed a bit as I was testing the setup. Instead of just doing a few quadraphonic tunes in the end, it became a concert in two main parts. One “ordinary” and one quadraphonic. That in itself was quite an interesting turn of events. I decided to divided one more in quarters, so I would introduce 3 songs at once and then play them like a suite. I started with 3 of my own songs, on the theme of joy, faith and hope. Then 3 pop songs representing love, peace and freedom.
After that, I switched into Quadraphonic mode and played two suits of 3 songs from the Quadraphonic album. And as an encore, I managed to do a version of my looped song A new dawn (though I didn’t bring the keytar!).
It was a great concert, but above all I felt that the most important achievement was to be able to do the quadraphonic songs. Now I know how to do it with having to bring 4 leslies!
After the concert there was a meet and greet. For the occasion I baked the sweet Icelandic rye bread that you do in old milk cartons and bake for many hours in low temperature. Always risky to offer natives something from their own traditions but I’ve been making this bread quite a lot in Sweden. And the Icelanders approved! They ate every single piece of it. So that was nice finale to the whole event.
