RAKEL is building a place to be

The ceiling of the church is painted navy blue with hand-painted golden stars, and there is an organ to lead the hymns. The place is called Staður; the place is called Place, a name chosen with Icelandic humility and without illusion. When the natural world that surrounds you is so total, to have a Place at all is not to be taken for granted.

Rakel Sigurðardóttir's debut album a place to be, is a love letter to our little worlds and enormous joys and sorrows they hold. But rather than telling us a story, it acts as a room in which we can find refuge from the relentless forward motion of our daily lives and find stillness. It’s a space built not by bricks and mortar but memory, place and self-reflection.

Since she emerged with her debut EP Nothing Ever Changes in 2021, the artist known mononymously as RAKEL has grown into an essential voice in the Icelandic music scene. She has performed with artists like Nanna (Of Monsters and Men), Axel Flóvent, and Kaktus Einarsson – and in 2022, released a collaborative album with Salóme Katrín and Zaar. It is impossible to tell the story of RAKEL without her community. In many ways, a place to be is a musical scrapbook of her friendships, and was ushered into being through Ólafur Arnalds’ OPIA Community which seeks to strengthen the bonds between like-minded creatives. This year, at Iceland Airwaves, Rakel will join OPIA for their showcase at IÐNÓ, bringing everyone together in real time.

To write a place to be, Rakel returned to Staður – the town of her childhood summers and wrote at the home where her mother grew up. “I worked there every summer as a teenager at a roadside diner my parents used to own, and all my cousins would be there and we’d just sell hotdogs every day. It was the best,” she reflects. “It was my coming-of-age, and it was my awkward phase of going to countryside dances with a band playing. A lot of ‘firsts’ took place there for me.” But then a new road was built and her grandparents’ business was sold, and nothing was quite the same. As the nature of the town changed, some part of her youth was lost irrevocably with it. “Years later, I decided I wanted to find my own relationship with the place now, and so I started going there to write,” she says. “My sister and I would go there and we’d have the cosiest times.”

And so Staður has become part of the fabric of the album itself; it’s in communion with a place and time that no longer exist, but captures the intangible tokens of the memories that evoke them. The sigh of wind that would rattle through the buildings, the ebb and flow of the tide and the cry of birds, the motion of the traffic that would pass where the roadside diner once stood – or, as with “Petrichor”, the resounding echo of the church which emerges as a voice in itself.

She often asked her grandmother questions about her own youth in the town, but it was met with blunt, unromantic answers – as is the way with her generation, says Rakel. The final song on the album, named after the town, captures the enchantment of the place that escapes words.

Her close friend and longtime collaborator, the Danish producer Sara Flindt, stood at the window together as she played the violin. “The landscape feels passive there, the mountains aren’t very dramatic, and so we tried to make these soft, curvy string arrangements,” she recalls. Though Rakel regards herself as a “traditional songwriter”, Flindt’s instinct is to build warped soundscapes around her through subtle, barely perceptible but deeply felt choices. What begins with that familiar hum of traffic reaches a devastating crescendo with a string quartet she recorded at Ólafur Arnalds’ OPIA Community studio. “It was my first time ever recording like that. I was like, ‘Oh my god, I feel so grown up now!’”

It's a cultural question long picked over by listeners and writers: what makes artists from Iceland so exceptional? There is an incredible proportion of musicians for such a small populace, where creativity feels more like a matter of course than a chosen path. “I just think we have a lot of time,” Rakel answers simply. “We have time and space, and from that comes ideas. It’s comfortable, too. There aren’t too many things to worry about; when I go to different cities people’s schedules are so full and there’s such a rush. We just don’t have that here.”

Rakel had played violin since she was six years old, and as a teenager started jazz singing in her hometown and studying it at music school. But for as long as she can remember, she has been a singer; though her family was not a musical one, they had always been supportive. “I was one of those annoying kids who sang all the time,” she smiles, “we’d be having dinner and there would be a rule to have no singing at the time. I’d be like, “I just need to finish this song!” She would even perform for her dad on his way to the bathroom, and wouldn’t permit him to use it until she had finished her song.

And yet she started writing her own music “very late”, by her own admission, only beginning while she was a student in Reykjavik. “I guess I was always a little scared of it,” she says. “I just didn’t feel I had anything to say at the time, but I knew I would later. It was just a matter of when. I like to move slowly; I don’t want to push anything. I love to work with other people and I’ve had so many opportunities to do that, and I guess that also took some time. But I wasn’t in a hurry. I knew it would happen at some point. But being a musician in Iceland is very much a community: I moved from my hometown in the north to Reykjavik and I felt so welcome here. I toured with lots of different artists on other projects, and I don’t feel that’s time wasted at all. I’ve built a nice group of people around me, and I’m thirty-three now, but it feels like the right time for me.”

“pickled peaches” is an ode to those friendships that fortified her confidence as an artist. The song features Nanna, Salóme Katrín, and Skúli Sverrisson and was born from a trip to the cabin where they wanted to write songs together – even though they had toured together before, writing was an unrealised dream. “We all played this game where we went into a corner and we were supposed to write five songs each within an hour. And then we came together, showed each other the songs, and we made dinner and had so much food – we ate, we had wine, we were just enjoying each other’s company. And then we sat down to write five more songs.”

In this cocoon of friendship, safety and indulgence – creating simply to spend more time together – the track spirited itself into life. “It was kind of like a movie moment,” she remembers. “They started to sing something over my guitar and the melodies just came.” Katrín started writing a lyric about the snowfall in May sunshine, and soon they sang in unison as lyrics detailing sensory memories of warmth and gentleness – kisses, hugs and slow mornings with coffee – started to fill the cabin. Their voices melt into one.

a place to be is, by necessity, a deeply reflective album. On “rescue remedy”, where Rakel's voice is electronically warped to reach a new depth of emotion in the vein of Imogen Heap, she writes of disentangling herself from a relationship without hope. “Under your spell / But I’m fonder of myself / In the arms of someone else”, she sings. But with “touch=change”, she begins to look inward. The title was inspired by Octavia E Butler’s Parable of the Sower. She never made it past the first pages because she was so arrested with the line: “All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. God is change.”

“It’s a simple thing, but everything we do – no matter what it is – carries a reaction. It made me think about how you go into a relationship one way and you leave it forever changed,” she says. You’re a different person. When I look back at the relationship I was in, I feel so changed from who I was then compared to who I am now. I learned from it.”

And through carving herself a place to be, what has she learned about herself as an artist? “I like to have people with me,” she tells me. “To do something by yourself is very hard, and being a solo artists can feel lonely. But with other people, it’s fun. It takes a bit of bravery to reach out to people sometimes, but just ask. There’s nothing to lose.”