Páll Guðmundsson

On the way back from Surtshellir we passed the church-farm Húsafell, and Bjarni told me that an artist named Páll lives here, and we could make a stop and see if he was home. It was already past 11 p.m., but there was light coming out of a shed, so we drove up, and when we got out of the car we heard music: Páll was home, he was in the workshed, playing his stone xylophone.

Páll Guðmundsson is an artist with more than one talent. He sculpts faces in rocks that he finds -- in such a way that the face is clearly visible, but also as much as possible of the original rock is still there. He draws on all kinds of materials -- also mostly faces, in earth tones, probably using pigments from nature. He builds all kinds of structures on his property. I admired the beautiful tower he had made out of a formerly used silo: now it is an art gallery. He plays music: classical music as well as Icelandic folk tunes. And he builds his own instruments -- xylophone style -- out of flat stones that he collects here in the vicinity. Each stone is tuned very precisely to a note and all are arranged lying on two bars padded with felt. A lower row for the "white keys" and a second row above, in groups of two and three, for the "black keys". The result: a fully chromatic lithophone.

He has built several such "stone harps", as he calls them, and although I could not communicate with him -- Páll doesn't seem to speak any English, unusually -- he played some music for Bjarni and me. He also demonstrated other instruments he made -- one from simple wooden sticks, and one from the dried hollow stems of a sort of giant rhubarb. And he also opened his church for us, we went in, and he played more music on another stone harp in the church.

I was deadly tired after such a long day that had begun in Reykjavik and ended in the most opposite place imaginable, a cave tunnel under a lava field in the middle of nowhere, and it all began to feel very very unreal. In all likelyhood I was actually somewhere else, dreaming this all up.

Páll is well known, not only here in the Reykholt area but in all Iceland. I saw a book about him. To tell just one story that I heard today, he has played together with the band Sigur Rós -- and in return, Sigur Rós have played a concert on Páll's birthday. If I understood it correctly, this concert was in a cave here. Funny how it all connects.

Sigur Rós was, after Björk, the second Icelandic music band I ever heard. My sister Moni lent me a DVD of them half a year ago when I told that I was going to Iceland this summer. Happy Birthday, Moni! :)