Extreme Chill Festival kynna:
Matt Black (Coldcut / Ninja Tune) - Drew McDowall (Coil) - Romeo Poirier - R-O-R (Gyða Valtýsdóttir & Úlfur Hansson) - Þóranna Björnsdóttir. Iðnó 5 Sept - Miðasala inn á midix.
Ath. Hátíðarpassi gildir á alla 5 dagana (þ.á.m. Þennan viðburð).
Matt Black is one half of the pioneering DJ and multimedia duo Coldcut, formed in 1987, and a founder of Ninja Tune, one of the world's leading independent electronic music labels. In 2015, Ninja Tune celebrated 25 years of groundbreaking releases, and in 2017, Coldcut marked 30 years in the industry.
Coldcut have been known for their innovations in DJing, remixing, VJing, apps, and multimedia projects. Their influential works include Journeys by DJ, Timber, Atomic Moog, Panopticon, and Re:volution, often combining artistic expression with activist themes. They have collaborated with a wide range of artists and organizations, including Steve Reich, James Brown, Jello Biafra, Saul Williams, Roots Manuva, and Greenpeace.
In 2011, Matt designed Ninja Tune’s first app, Ninja Jamm, downloaded over 500,000 times. He later developed the visual synth app Pixi, the satirical game Robbery, and Midivolve in collaboration with Ableton. Matt has explored AI-driven visual art and collaborated with Wolfgang Buttress for the BEAM AV installation at Glastonbury 2019. His app Jamm Pro was released in 2019.
Matt Black’s mission is to create "positive art, music, and spiritual technology to catalyze cooperative strategies worldwide." He continues to DJ, VJ, lecture, and bridge the worlds of technology, activism, and art.
Drew McDowall: An Artist Beyond Conformity
Drew McDowall's works are sacraments to alterity. An artist who has consistently refused to conform — in both music and life — McDowall explores the hallucinatory spaces between reality and celestial otherness. His meditative compositions are haunting and spiritual, weaving intricate modular soundscapes with cut-up samples and deconstructing sounds into their most elemental, shuddering forms. The resulting disorienting ambient mirages evoke terror, tender melancholy, and glimpses of expansive, heavenly beauty. McDowall creates music of immanence and alchemy, equally attuned to the sacred and the profane.
His backstory reads like a primer on psychedelic fiction, threaded with tales that verge on the unbelievable, superhuman, and outright insane. Growing up amid the gang violence of 1970s Scotland, McDowall — exhausted by daily brutality and chaos — sought refuge in punk music. He found a home within Glasgow’s thriving underground scene.
After forming The Poems with his then-wife Rose McDowall, he moved into the orbit of UK avant-garde luminaries like Genesis P-Orridge, David Tibet, Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson, and John Balance — key figures who would shape the evolution of experimental and industrial music. McDowall went on to collaborate with Psychic TV and became a full-time member of the influential cult group Coil, where his contributions helped guide the band's later output toward exercises in magical practice and music-as-psychoactive effect.
Throughout his career, McDowall has maintained a deep affinity for electronic music, yet has consistently avoided being confined to any single genre. His most recent works incorporate a diverse range of instrumentation, including strings, brass, pipe organ, and harp.
This openness to experimentation is also evident in his collaborations with a wide array of artists, including Kali Malone, Caterina Barbieri, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Hiro Kone, Varg, Puce Mary, Shapednoise, Rabit, James K, Elvin Brandhi, and LEYA.
McDowall has toured a live AV reinterpretation of Coil’s seminal drone masterpiece, Time Machines, at festivals around the world, including CTM, Berlin Atonal, Dark Mofo, Unsound, Le Guess Who, Semibreve, WOS, and Ambient Church.
Romeo Poirier
Romeo Poirier is a French electronic musician whose work centers on the heavy processing of samples and digital collage. Blending intricate sonic textures with a deep sense of time and memory, Poirier creates music that feels simultaneously nostalgic and mysteriously ahistorical.
He has released acclaimed albums on a range of forward-thinking labels, including Kit Records (Plage Arrière), Sferic (Hotel Nota), and Faitiche (Living Room), the imprint curated by Jan Jelinek. His compositions are known for transforming layers of temporal fragments into a fluid, pulsating continuity—an auditory meditation on memory, environment, and perception.
Poirier’s upcoming album, Off the Record, is set for release on October 10, 2025, via Faitiche. The album is an entertaining and conceptually rich tour de force: 14 miniature collage works built from accidental studio recordings and conversations—a clandestine dive into the hidden soundworlds of recording sessions past.
R-O-R (Gyða Valtýsdóttir & Úlfur Hansson)
R-O-R refers to the chemical structure of ether, a compound formed when two elements bond to create entirely new matter. This notion of transformation and union gives its name to the collaboration between Icelandic musicians Gyða Valtýsdóttir and Úlfur Hansson, whose new album, AUGA, represents a unique act of musical alchemy—an ethereal merging of sound and spirit.
On AUGA, the duo creates an expansive sonic landscape that feels like stepping into a lucid dream. Earthly elements—rain, geology, wind—intertwine with the celestial and surreal. Úlfur’s custom-built synthesizer weaves seamlessly with the radiant tones of Gyða’s cello, forming a shimmering tapestry where the material and spectral converge.
This album marks a new chapter in a long-running creative relationship. Gyða contributed cello to Úlfur’s Arborescens, while Úlfur shaped the arrangements and production on Gyða’s albums Evolution and Ox. Their deeper collaboration began with the Icelandic Music Award–nominated track "Morphogenesis", from Gyða’s Epicycle II—a piece that, true to its biological namesake, unfolded as an exploration of form and transformation. Partly improvised, partly composed, it laid the foundation for the symbiotic process that would become AUGA.
The result is a dreamscape of long-form compositions shaped by themes of the astral and the eternal. AUGA feels primordial—like a glowing plasma where melodies materialize from nothingness, only to dissolve into waves of shapeless beauty. On "Petrichor", named for the scent of rain, dew-drop strings blend into bedrock drones. Tracks like "Esters" and "Onium Ion" evoke a molecular dance of atoms, while "Vacuum" plunges us into the abyss of geological deep-time.
Þóranna Björnsdóttir
Þóranna Björnsdóttir (b. 1976) is a sound and visual artist based in Reykjavík, Iceland. She studied music from an early age, graduating as a classical pianist before moving into contemporary music and art. Þóranna completed her BA at the ArtScience Interfaculty between the Royal Academy of Art and the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague in 2006, and earned an M.Art.Ed degree from the Iceland Academy of the Arts in 2014. She has also attended and taught various courses and workshops in music, sound, and visual art.
Þóranna's work focuses on the act of listening, exploring sound as an intuitive medium and a form of knowledge—enabling myriad images, associations, and outcomes across form, time, and space. Her multidisciplinary practice often places the viewer or audience at the center and incorporates elements of sculpture, performance, and soundwork. Themes often revolve around human nature and evolving worldviews. Þóranna has exhibited widely and performed at numerous concerts and art festivals both in Iceland and internationally. She is also a sound and performance artist with the international art group Wunderland and co-curated the 2020 art biennale Sequences X,
titled “Time Has Come.”
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