on being weird: wetness
Contemporary romantics have been rediscovering the epic song of nature as of late, well our whole culture has taken a shine to it ever since the all too perfect marriage of Planet Earth and Sigur Ros. But then Iceland has often been attached to the epic, how could they not dwelling in that mountainous and glacial region sitting just outside the Arctic Circle? Within such easy reach of great tracts of visually arresting imagery the epic must come easy to them, just as London produces a wealth of urban music relaying the mix of decadence and depravity of city-living. The environment surrounds them and turns their gaze upon it, it is simply a natural reaction to their own landscape. The localisation of the epic causes further contemplation. When the Romantic poet Shelley visited the Chamonix Valley in 1816 it was the localisation of the epic, or to put it another way the soul gazing deep into the infinite, that caused him to write his poem Mont Blanc, below is an excerpt:
Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky,
Mont Blanc appears,-still snowy and serene-
Its subject mountains their unearthly forms
Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between
Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,
Blue as the overhanging heaven
