The Haunting of ‘Space Song’: A Memory of Iceland
Me in Iceland, November 2015 In 2015, I went to Iceland for the Airwaves Music Festival. The trip was planned with someone I was seeing—a whirlwind romance that felt magnetic, inevitable, like gravity. But by the time we arrived, that gravity had dissolved. We weren’t together anymore. The romance was gone, but the trip remained. So we went, not as lovers, but as friends—or at least, we tried to be. Iceland is unlike anywhere else. It feels ancient, as if the earth itself just exhaled its first breath. Black sand beaches stretch endlessly, glaciers loom like sleeping giants, and the air feels impossibly clean, almost too quiet. It’s a place that strips you bare, leaving you alone with the enormity of the landscape—and your own thoughts. In that vast, otherworldly space, it’s hard to ignore the emptiness you carry, even with someone by your side. I first heard Beach House’s “Space Song” during their performance at Harpa. The room felt suspended in time as the song unfolded, its ethereal...
