Good Moon Deer turned out to be the one of the biggest surprises of the last edition of Reykjavík Music Mess Festival to me. It’s an experimental schizophrenic electronic with incredibly improvising jazzy drums. Two persons are set up on stage face to face, just to have an eye contact with each other and to choose in every second of their performance which direction they shall follow, where they shall push an amazed listener. I admired Greg Fox of Liturgy for a drumming storm. I hadn’t had any idea that Ívar Pétur Kjartansson, who folds time cone in collaboration with Guðmundur Ingi Úlfarsson, is so cIose and together they send a listener into a music trance loop.
I have liked Good Moon Deer since I saw them live for the first time but while looking for more and more of their sounds I found Harold. It’s a slow and dark composition that contains samples from one of my favourite movies – Harold and Maude from 1971 (dir. Hal Ashby).
That’s a chit-chat about the drummer, but actually he simply makes this project more spicy. He has been immersed in music for his entire life so he supports the second half of the project with his wide knowledge and impressive drumming skills. This half that takes care of the computer and composing process. They don’t come from Reykjavík. They met in east Iceland before Ívar Pétur went to the capital city to play with such bands like Míri, FM Belfast or Benni Hemm Hemm.
Then, Guðmundur went to study to Amsterdam and he started making music on his computer there. A loner on stage wanted some companion. In 2011 his old pal Ívar Pétur joined his project. That’s how started a new chapter in Good Moon Deer’s history.
The band has already returned from its first tour called Nordisk 2014 that aimed to perform specially for listeners from smaller towns in Denmark, Norway and the Faroe Islands. The musicians announced that a lot is going to happen during this year. They hope for finishing work on the debut album. Interestingly, the duo had sworn for a long time that their compositions won’t be released as an album because Good Moon Deer doesn‘t want to go in this old fashioned way and believes in modern technologies, so instead of this gentlemen were focused on releasing another new songs. But time for changes has come.
In August 2012 Good Moon Deer released the first music video for its song Blur. They made it in an unusual way. The video was created with using the new HTML5 technology. It was mostly done by Guðmundur Ingi, who is also a graphic designer and he just played with photographs using this technology. Good Moon Deer is the first Icelandic band that decided to create a music video in such a way. You can watch it on official website of the project. But in December last year they released another video. This time it was prepared for a song entitled Again. This clip is made up of short fragments that cooperate with each other and create a new story although they don’t base on any other theme. So a viewer can decide what is the video about, he is able to make his own narrative background. Again was directed by Hrefna Sigurðardóttir and Axel Sigurðarson.
