On the 2nd of October the international multimedia project “Iceland. Musical ground” starts at Erarta. Musician Sergey Navetny and photographer Igor Vereshchagin are presenting portraits of twelve modern music bands with the psychedelic landscapes of the far and mysterious island on the background
Iceland is an exceptional country, specially its territory, which is very compact due to absence of big number of cities; but there are a lot of musicians living in the country. The world knows such famous names as Bjork, Sigur Ros, Gus Gus, Mum, and the list isn’t done yet. There are a lot of different musicians in Iceland, but they surely have something in common. Perhaps thanks to that celestial vitality this country is a home for original unique folk music, which captures the feeling of places, where it was born.
The project “Iceland. Musical ground” has risen from the long-term desire of Sergey «Nava» Navetny, famous drummer and photographer from St. Petersburg, to travel around Iceland with a camera. Sergey contacted with his old friend Natalya «Victors» Kovashkina, who has been living in Iceland for many years. The result of talking on-line on the Internet for many days was an idea to combine «the music» and «the territory». It was agreed to outline a wide stylistic slice of modern Icelandic music, and offer musicians to take photo-sessions with the brightest Icelandic locations on the background. On their opinion, these places could show the best correlation with the music of Icelandic artists and would be dearly loved by them. After several months the long list of artists was shortened to 12 names. It included both music pioneers, for example Dimma and Minus, and novices Blood Group and For A Minor Reflection, who just released their first albums. At this point Sergey attracted Igor Vereschagin, famous photographer who is dearly loved by many Russian musicians. It took 2 months to make timetables of shooting, logistics, tickets, an accommodation and cars.
The result of three imperfect weeks in Iceland was 3500 km of total mileage on an old Pajero, several hours of shooting a film and time-laps and gigabytes of photo materials with the imprinted celestial landscapes and terrestrial for registration, but also celestial for disposition the musicians.
The authors:
Sergey Navetny (St. Petersburg) is a professional musician and photographer. He co-worked with many bands, for instance: Nate!, Koshkin Dom, Nastya, Spleen. His favorite genres are the landscape and the urban report. Since 2004 he began shooting professionally. He contributed to the magazines «British style», «BackBeat", "Billboard". Since 2010 Sergey has been taking sport photography such as the international tennis competitions "Saint-Petersburg Open", Fencing World Cup, as well as football matches for «Zenit football club». Also he is a participant of the Second Photo biennale of Russian Museum (St. Petersburg, 2012).
Igor Vereschagin (Moscow), master of portrait photography. He worked for many magazines: from «Light» to Classic Rock, Digital Photo and Video. He took a lot of photos for record covers and posters of the bands Neprikasaemye, Spleen, Bi-2, Jethro Tull etc. He worked as a photographer in many films, including "Mongol" by Sergey Bodrov, Pyotr Todorovsky’s films, all films by Garik Sukachev. For many years he has been presenting CANON as a photographer and adviser during all technical exhibitions in Russia.