Kira Kira

Kira Kira is Kristín Björk Kristjánsdóttir (b. 1977), an Icelandic composer and audio/visual artist. She is a founding member of Kitchen Motors, a label and collective based on experiments in music, creative collaboration and the melting-together of art forms.
Kira Kira sprang from this collective in year 1999 and to this day works with Kitchen Motors' ethos at heart -a spirit of playfulness, exploring the relationship between experimental music and visual arts, collaborating with artists of various disciplines.
At first Kira Kira played solo but since year 2008 she has recorded and played with a wide range of musicians, mostly trumpet player Eiríkur Orri Ólafsson, Finnish percussionist Samuli Kosminen and artist Alex Somers as well as guitarists Hilmar Jensson and Pétur Hallgrímsson.
Kira Kira has composed music for theater, film, dance and art installations. Recently she composed music for Notes From The Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky which is currently playing at the Schaubühne Theater in Berlin.
She has released 2 albums, Skotta and Our Map to The Monster Olympics. Her third album will be released in 2011.
KIRA KIRA —scream the seagulls. You stand on a beach with black stone rumble in your hands. Kira Kira—the sand grounds. You watch the wash of November storm waves against the hard-knocked starboard side of the island.
The wind hums in the corners of the isolated hut. A subtle whish of dust from the curtains. Kira Kira—screeks the door. You play a dusty note on the harmonium. Touch the pedals. Sing a dry flower note. Chants turn into rants. Black sand in an instrument, the harmonium full of storm water. Noise upon noise.
Unpredictable. Kira Kira -capricious. Matti Pentikainen, 2010.
An unpredictable dialogue of electro-acoustic pranksterism and innocent melodic pop is at the heart of Our Map to the Monster Olympics, the new LP from this curious Icelandic artist.
Picking up where we left off on her 2006 LP Skotta, Our Map to the Monster Olympics is a twisting, sometimes terrifying, often glorious and touching kaleidoscope of a record. Swarms of fragmented voices mouth melodies through home made microphones while contact-mic'ed kalimba's fight for breath in seas of beautifully damaged technicolor, granulated shotgun beats fire from sniper positions in foreboding atmospheres- AND YET armies of glockenspiels, brass and casio's remind us that everything will, in fact, be ok-
Since 1999 Kira has been a constant enigma- extremely hard to define and almost impossible to anticipate. As a founding member of Icelandic art collective Kitchen Motors, audio/visual artist Kira Kira has been a pivotal figure in contemporary Icelandic music. She has composed music extensively for theatre, dance and film and created a myriad of sound and video installations everywhere from Beijing to New York. Taking a particular interest in blurring the lines of visual and performing arts Kira has appeared in all kinds of curious venues; in church towers, gallery spaces, abandoned prisons, croatian breweries and various other curious places, creating lasting images of singing black holes, dueling smoke machines, kite symphonies and exploding cassette tapes across the globe
Ben Frost 2008