Interview: Seyðisfjörður Community Radio
Seyðisfjörður Community Radio (SCR) is a shared digital and analogue broadcasting platform located in the fisher town of Seyðisfjörður. The platform is hosted, nurtured and initiated by an open-ended international community inhabiting various conditions and positions. Its members and contributors are often scattered all over the planet – but they all, at one point, have been residents in Seyðisfjörður. From their current locations, places and times, they share, they inquire and they keep in touch - over the radio.
“We send. We listen. We send. We listen”, as they put it. SCR is by no means the first cultural initiative in the small town. The radio is a result of decades of artistic activities in the region, most notably LungA School and the long-running LungA Art Festival (which ended in 2024). To learn more about the past, present and future of the place, we asked COSMOS teammate and ICRN co-founder Samantha Lippett to check in with Lasse Høgenhof, one of the heads behind LungA School and SCR. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Later this year, our COSMOS Embassies ICRN and SCR are co-organising a radio gathering in Seyðisfjörður. Representatives from 12+ radio stations will be hosted by Seyðisfjörður Community Radio, who have produced a 10-day program for radio makers and organisers inspired by their years of building creative learning "situations" through LungA School (and through the radio). Follow ICRN and SCR to learn more, or tune in between the 9-18th September for daily broadcasts from their time in the fjord.
Speaking of radio activities: For our monthly COSMOS radio show on Refuge Worldwide, Seyðisfjörður Community Radio have produced a one-hour special to get us into to the mood.
SAMANTHA
Could you start by telling me where you're sitting right now? I think if someone hasn’t been to Seyðisfjörður, or hasn’t been to Iceland, it's hard to conjure up exactly what that looks like.
LASSE
A really good question to start with. When you only think about the community radio (SCR), and Seyðisfjörður as an arts community, it is quite abstract to understand what Seyðisfjörður is.
We’re in the east of Iceland. I'm sitting by the river, in the town center, and across the street is the local community center where our radio station is located.
There’s also the European ferry, so many travelers pass through the town every year. I think, besides the 700 inhabitants, there are about 40,000 people that visit Seyðisfjörður every year, plus an arts community of maybe 200-300 people that come through and live here for a while. I've heard that when you are visiting, it is easy to forget that after all, we are just 700 people, bringing our kids to kindergarten, going to a supermarket, and doing local things.
How do you feel the locals react to these different groups of people? From my perspective, LungA School seems to be fairly welcomed.
I would say most of the institutions here grew out of Seyðisfjörður. The people of Seyðisfjörður are very welcoming. Everyone working in hotels, restaurants, cafes and little shops, they're local people, too. I also live here all year round, and feel very much part of this culture of welcoming, I would say, abnormally experimental practices into the fabric of Seyðisfjörður.
But there is also this joke in town, you know, that people don't really notice when some of these people (the artists) change. To them, there is just this group of experimentalists and they tolerate them. But they don't necessarily know who those people are or what they're doing.
This identification is what is so beautiful. I have friends here that I’ve known for ten years, we play on the local old person's football team. None of them have any idea of what I'm doing. I think that's such a beautiful relationship. Many people in town have that relationship with all the people who are coming here.
And then there are all these Seyðisfjörður-based institutions that are hosting different things. Probably ten institutions and initiatives, bigger and smaller. All of us have a monthly meeting, where we come together and eat soup. We take turns hosting it, and then we update each other. So I have a strong feeling that we are all locals doing this.
But Lasse, you're not from Seyðisfjörður originally and I was wondering if you could tell me about that. How did you end up in this town?
I've ended up here a few times and then noticed: I'm not done ending up here. I'll explain what I mean by that.
I was invited to Iceland the first time in 2010 and then I came again that summer to participate in the LungA Art Festival. I got invited by a friend, Björt Sigfinnsdóttir. She was part of starting this festival. When she was a teenager there was a period where there was just little to do here for young people between 14 and 20. There still is little to do here to be fair. Most of the people we are hosting are between 20 and 50.
So back then there were some really cool parents that said to this group of teenagers, “Okay, what do you want to do?” That kind of resulted in this gathering of young people in the east of Iceland. They sent out an invitation for young people to come to Seyðisfjörður for a week and participate in creative workshops. And then they turned it into a festival week. There were like 40 people at the first one. And that festival grew and grew. These 16-year-olds became 18, 20, 25 and so on. And so their perspective, ambition and network grew along with the festival. Suddenly it started escalating. More people got involved, and some of them moved away. All of a sudden it had grown into a festival for lots of people from abroad, with a big concert program.
But even before the festival, Seyðisfjörður had been a hideout for artists, mostly because of its cheap housing prices. Certain artists would bring their whole entourages over here, start a gallery in town and so on. It had already been a place for artists to come, but not necessarily with any institutions behind them. Just with abandoned and cheap houses.
Are you referring to the days of Dieter Roth, the Fluxus artist?
Yeah, I think he’s one of them. So this Swiss-German printmaker and Fluxus artist, Dieter Roth, came to Iceland. He lived in Reykjavik and married here. He also taught at the Academy. He almost kept it a secret. He became famous during his lifetime, so he was also a globetrotter. But Iceland was his refuge. At some point he started following this group of artists towards the east, and got a house here. I wouldn't say he was the one who discovered it. But he was part of the first wave of artists that were going east.
Basically, this area was already open to the arts, and the LungA Art Festival opened it for young people. So when I came here, I just remember being so fascinated by these amazing conditions for making art and being with people. When I came here, I didn't even consider myself having an arts practice. But I had an itch and somehow it all seemed very possible here.
It’s still like this: and anyone who comes here, if they're willing to give it a go, then everyone will come out for the exhibition, help with documentation and really get into this. That's part of the legacy of Seyðisfjörður.
Has it always been like this since the 1980s?
A lot of the artists that were here in the 80s had similar agendas. Their practices revolved around a kind of anti-structural art making. When I came here much later, it still felt like, wow, there's no gatekeepers. We can just do it! Shortly after, me, my friend from here and some other friends bought a house. We completely tore down the house, spent some years renovating it, and made that into a residency.
And at the same time, we started a conversation about what we could do all year round? When tourism stops in the summer, it's very silent in Seyðisfjörður. Everything closes down, and there are no people here. Just a few artists in residence at Skaftfell Art Center. And that's it. I was here in 2011 in the winter time, and there was nothing happening. So there was also this huge empty space to do something.
We had a whole community center, and all these empty spaces and people that were yearning to give us space and time. So it was pretty easy to step into that space, make collaborations and form relationships. So that was the start of LungA School, as people are talking about now.
In the first few years, we wrote a manifesto for the school that was kind of like a sponge of all the different intellectual and aesthetic inputs we got in those years. We really gained a lot of knowledge and inspiration from structuralists within music and neoclassicists within music, the way they were talking about music making and the gathering around music. We learned so much from this group. And I think we somehow, without knowing, gave ourselves a fascination for making radio back then.
You know, I remember the first time we got a closet that was like our closet, and we thought now we're going to have storage for the first time in the school. Then I think it took two weeks and then a group of participants built it into an archive and said, “Now this is the school archive”. A performing archive of unfinished artwork, or something like this. Then it was like oh shit and we had to go and find a new place for our stuff. Somehow the school keeps being occupied by its own citizens and this keeps happening. I keep trying to build and occupy some space for some function that I think would be interesting for the school and then some people say “No, no, no…Now this is a theatre. We're going to use this room as a theatre.” So, yeah, that is also a part of the development of the school.
I want to ask you about the radio and how it became part of the school. I think there was a story about this, like you found a transmitter?
We invited this person called Erik DeLuca – he's teaching in Boston now – because of our interest in sound. He had just made this project on an island in Maine where he had been recording wolf packs over years, and turned it into a huge audio archive and installation. He came and held a radio workshop. He brought one of those little pirate transmitters that maybe had a range of one kilometer, or something like that. That was the first time we figured out how interesting it was to create a radio space in the school.
And Erik did something really cool: he left all the gear behind. “No, you can have it. Just keep it. If you want to make radio, I'll just get new stuff.” At some point, we also had two interns that were only working with sound, both of them, and they kind of facilitated the whole internship over radio. I did all the school’s promotion, documentation or communication over radio for a year, and we started talking to each other over the radio.
For many years, we had an FM transmitter which had been active in the past in Seyðisfjörður and we found out that the frequency used to be 107.1. We set up shop in a little attic room in town, and operated from there for some years.
I’m also curious how the community of Seyðisfjörður is much bigger than Seyðisfjörður in terms of the current occupancy because of all the people that come through the school and retain a connection. For me, certainly, it’s through the radio. I tune in and I’m still connected in this way. I think it’s really interesting, for such a small place, how the radio retains the network.
A few years ago, we took the next step with the radio. The platform we had was more for the people who were making the radio and less for the listeners. We wanted to make it a little bit more reliable, more easy to operate, a little bit more transparent.
Now we are broadcasting all the time online, and we are getting a new transmitter installed, too. So there will be constant radio access in Seyðisfjörður and we have switched the platform, so we can plan our radio station better and it's easier for people to see what’s happening when. We also have 700 shows in our archive that we can re-contextualize and use. So often when we have a monthly live show, we broadcast that show every week for the coming month, for example. Just so it's more accessible for more people to just tune in randomly.
These developments are also coinciding with quite an interesting moment: You’re establishing a Radio School. I began to learn about this through this collection of broadcasts you were making about what it means to make a school on air.
The idea of experimenting with school making as a practice has been interesting for us for a long time. Actually I think it started when you, Sam, contacted us about being a part of ICRN. Prior, we were an unestablished radio that made a rather abnormal amount of radio, simply because we liked making it. When we started talking to you, we got a feeling, like, there are collaborators out there. If we make this a little bit more solid, this might open up a whole new world. A whole forest can grow on this platform. At the same time, LungA School started sprouting. For many years, we just had one program at the school, and that was it.
Along with this came an Erasmus application. We got the funding, and since we already had a program funded on soil, we thought okay “what could it mean to make a program on air?” This was the time to experiment with doing a radio-based school – school making that is only happening over broadcasts. We started developing this concept and started talking about aesthetics, interior, discourse, platforms and all this stuff. Radio is very much a medium that has a huge influence on its content. So we thought we need to be influenced by this medium if we are making something that happens in this medium.
And not just that. I think the framing of a conversation on air, for me at least, keeps me very contained. I’m able to really focus because of the time limitations. It sometimes allows me to imagine great ideas just through the framing of a broadcast. It was interesting to use that as a container for that development.
We had a feeling we needed to rewrite our manifesto. But then we wrote it in the form of an invitation. We're quite humbled by this whole project. So we felt like we had to be very honest with the people we invite into it. I think we wrote a 20-page invitation where we were like, “Okay, we would like you to be a part of this, but please read this first, and if you still want to be a part of it, then I think this would maybe be a good filter for it.” At the same time we also gained funding to build these platforms, both the online and the FM platform. And we have a room now, here in town, that I have just rebuilt over the last two weeks. Now it's much more inviting for the community.
With so many international contributors, how does it work on a practical level between time zones?
We have 18 hours between the ones who are furthest away, from California to Australia. So yes, it is complicated but we are letting things go a bit. And we are learning. For example the weekly gathering, it's just impossible for everyone to join. Now we started taking turns hosting the gatherings, and the one who hosts the gathering is just deciding when it is, and then the people can show up or not. We archive all programs pretty instantly, so you can always listen to the live program whenever.
Obviously, most of the people reading this will come from an international audience perspective. I'm just curious, like, what kinds of music will we hear when we tune into Seyðisfjörður Community Radio? Or what other kinds of content can be expected? Is there a relationship to music, or is it more individual compositions of sound, art, talking?
Historically it's been a little random. It's been very much driven by the people who have been making the radio. There hasn't been a lot of editorial attention. We have quite a strong relationship to music and sound in general. Now, we have a few programs every month that are focussing on music, sound art and field recording. Ben DuVall from New York is making a program every month called The Condition of Music. That is an extensive two-hours program about, e.g. the garden, and then he talks about the garden and music that is made from garden making.
A month ago I started building an archive, the Seyðisfjörður Sound Archive. The aim is to have practitioners who have worked with sound in any way to contribute to this archive in the coming years. I'm just now slowly starting to send inquiries to artists that may like to contribute. I've contributed 20 hours of sound so far. So that is something you can expect to happen. Of course, many of the programs people are making contain music but we are also an extremely low budget radio, so we don't have capacity to have music in that way. 80% of the music we are playing is music that has been made here, or was made for the radio, or in connection to the radio. A lot of unfinished, unpublished music lives on this radio channel. So my dream for the radio is that in the future we will play mostly sounds that somehow echo Seyðisfjörður.
What about your relationship to radio making? Why do you keep doing it?
I also work a lot with visual production, making images and drawings and big visual stuff, and it's always so painful. It's such a painful practice because I always feel I have to get extremely lucky to make something that I'm interested in. But with radio making, I always have an abundance of ideas and a big space to maneuver. Even though I'm not a sound artist or work with sound in my life, I always somehow know what I want to make, which is a really nice feeling.
The radio space is such an amazing space to put work into. I also really like the way that my own work can be together with other people. Most of my practice in general is built around situations. But I would say radio is really where the medium, by default, excites me. I figured out that radio as a learning space is extremely valuable. The way you can be present with other people, learn from other people, listen to material and other people's experiences and stuff. For me, it’s become the ultimate educational platform in my life. The more I do it, the more my fascination grows for radio making.
