Inspired #222 - BSÍ
Icelandic DIY-pop duo BSÍ have just released a double teaser of their debut album, which is due out in May, with 25Lue’ & ‘Dónakallalagið’. The tracks split into two different sides of the band, one part lo-fi melancholy and one part riot grrrl punk. They took a moment to talk to us about the inspirations behind their music.
Who are your top three musical inspirations?
Silla: It’s hard to choose only three musical inspirations. We are really influenced by the people around us and our friends, who are doing amazing things. We are a part of this DIT (do-it-together) grassroots art collective called post-dreifing and all the people there are an endless source of inspiration. We’re listening a lot to bands like Gróa, supersport!, side project, and many others that you can find here: www.post-dreifing.is
Is there a certain film that inspires you?
Silla: There are three films that we saw last year when we were writing our upcoming album, and that sort of stuck with us: “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” (Celine Sciamma), “When They See Us” (Ava DuVernay) and “Horse Girl” (Jeff Baena). And then there were some more movies that inspired us, but unfortunately we forgot their names. If we would remember the names of these films, you could watch them and listen to our upcoming album in reverse at the same time, with headphones that only work on the left channel, and get what we mean.
What city do you find the most inspiring?
Silla: Haha, I’m very bad with answering questions about what’s “the most” of something. I have found many cities to be inspiring in their own way, but at the moment I’m actually just very inspired by my hometown, Reykjavík.
Julius: To me the most inspiring city might always be the city that I haven’t yet come to. Or just old buildings somewhere.
Who is the most inspiring person to you?
Julius: Silla!
Silla: Julius!
What were your inspirations when writing ‘25Lue’ & ‘Dónakallalagið’?
Julius: We wrote ‘25Lue’ when I was staying for some weeks in Lübeck, the town that I was born in, and Silla came to visit me there. It is a very old city with plenty of history and stories in all its little streets and ancient brick buildings. The lyrics of the song deal with some kind of reconciliation with the past, the peace that settles in months after a breakup, a mellow feeling, but also the hope for the next summer to come soon.
For me personally though this song somehow also always reminds me of the moment my best friend Silla came all the way to visit me in the town that I was born in, and how incredibly fond I was of this gesture, and how much I appreciate our friendship.
Silla: Aaaaaww! Sentimental Julius <3 ‘Dónakallalagið’, the other song we just released, is quite the opposite, energetic and screaming. The inspiration for this one stems from issues that empowering movements like Me Too and The slut walk, have taken on. “Dónakall” is an icelandic term (a direct translation would be something like “pervy rude guy”) that usually describes that cis-male-white-hetero-patriarchal energy that we think it’s time to make extinct for good, at last. The lyrics are an anthem against all the „dónakallar“ that have, for too long, taken too much space, sexually harassed and overstepped people's boundaries.
How would you like to inspire people?
Julius: We started BSÍ under the premise of playing instruments we didn’t know how to play in the beginning. It’s not on us to decide if we’re any better playing these instruments now, and at the same time we also don’t really care – because that might just be the whole point of it: we just do what we feel like doing, and as long as it feels good for us we’ll keep on going. – like the amazing musician and queen of coolness Steinunn dj. flugvél og geimskip says: Do all the things you want to do, don’t do the things you don’t want to do! :)