To coincide with his retrospective at the Barbican, Iceland’s Ragnar Kjartansson presented a musical evening at the space’s theater on July 19 alongside members (and ex-members) of cult bands including The National and Múm.It was difficult to know what to expect from “An Evening with the Bel-Air Glamour Records Gang” — named after a record label founded by Kjartansson to release musical materials associated with his performance art. All of the musical pieces in the exhibition deal with lengthy durations, and many incorporate repetition. For instance, “A Lot of Sorrow” involved The National playing their song “Sorrow” for six hours straight, and in “God,” Kjartansson himself sings the phrase “sorrow overcomes happiness” as a 1950s nightclub crooner for an hour. Would the gig follow the same structure, becoming an Erik Satie-like exercise in the lengthy repetition of minor motifs?The answer was no, although the gig did end up following the pattern of long duration. What was billed as a concert of slightly over 90 minutes ended up being three hours of drum-based stand up comedy, Icelandic hip hop poetry, and Ragnar Kjartansson smoking a giant cigar while singing a Robert Schumann song that he described as “a power ballad from the 19th century.”The setting was familiar to anyone who had visited the Barbican exhibition, with the plush pink curtain that features in their installation for “God” replicated here in gold lamé. This curtain set the tone for the evening: Kjartansson presented the acts riffing off both his persona from that performance, and the sort of strange European musical variety shows that featured such curtains in the 1950s to 1970s. At one point, he called it “a bit Eurovision,” and that is exactly what it was — albeit a parallel world Eurovision focused on classical music, poetry, and avant-garde vocal and cello performances.Although naffness was built into the deliberately stilted presentation style, complete with microphone twirls and pointing at the audience, it did not get in the way of the various performances. A highlight among these was anything featuring Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir, previously of Icelandic electronic band Múm. With astounding vocals pitched somewhere between Joanna Newsom and actress Shirley Henderson, she was an odd beguiling presence both singing alone and in the finale with her twin sister Gyða and fellow twins Bryce and Aaron Dessner of The National, together playing music as a kind of alt-ABBA.In totality, it was an evening of delights that both complemented the Barbican exhibition and highlighted the wit of Kjartansson as an artistic and musical presence. If Eurovision ever does come to Iceland, let him host.
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