"First Song": One Second of Fame!

I met so many great musicians in Iceland this summer, while helping to run the Melodica Reykjavík festival, but probably my favorite discovery was a German singer/musician/painter named Peter Piek, a guy with a sweet, strange voice and a gentle presence and mad skills with a guitar and a bass and a looping pedal.

He collaborates with a video director named Marcus Grysczok to make these stop-motion music videos where Marcus photographs Peter jumping in the air lots and lots and lots of times, so that in the final product it looks like he's flying. They were shooting a new video while they were touring in Iceland, so on an idyllic, sunny day down by Reykjavík harbor, during an outdoor breakfast we hosted for all the musicians between performance nights of Melodica, a whole bunch of us put in cameo appearances: We each took a turn standing in one spot and jumping on Marcus' command – 20 jumps, I think, which at one frame per jump is just enough to make up one second of footage. See if you can spot my one second of fame!

The video is finally out, and it's cool and catchy as I knew it would be, but also way more beautiful than I could have imagined. Iceland...sometimes I look at pictures of Iceland and wonder how it's even possible that we're not all in Iceland, all the time. Plus, it's full of familiar faces and beloved places, from Reykjavík to Ísafjörður and in between, from my friends' amazing house where they host concerts in a converted former dance hall to all those wonderful Melodica folks jumping in the sunshine down by the harbor on a Reykjavík day nearly too beautiful to be true.