All of you who know me a bit or follow me in one way or another will know that i’m a big advocate of personal projects. I just think that one of the best reasons for doing extraordinary work is when it is close to your heart and your passion. Of course you have to find others who love it too (and are willing to support you) as someone has to pay the bills at the end, what is not always easy, especially when it is about my work about underreported issues and stories. But my experience so far was that showing people that you are fully passion driven about your project helps a lot and makes the decision of a potential sponsor to give you money for your project way easier for him. It is never easy and sometimes it could be frustrating to an extend that makes you close to giving up. But passion is also about fighting, right?
Why i’m writing all that? Because of a project that combines all the above written, the passion and the struggles. And it catched my heart directly as it’s purpose is about two of my free time passions: Iceland and icelandic music. Sonic Iceland is a project started by Kai Müller, also known as the man behind the famous german blog Stylespion, and Marcel Krüger, an expat in Dublin. They call themselves fanboys for the music and their aim is to create a portrait of the icelandic music scene with videos, pictures, interviews and all that (could be an interesting thing for multimedia when you think about it…) At the end they want to do something old-school with it – create a book out of all the stories and pictures to shape a in-depth look into the scene, away from the stereotypes that might be created by music journalists, trying to talk about the icelandic music scene in one article. They plan to spend the whole June in Iceland and cover as much of the atmosphere, the stories and the people behind it as possible. They created a blog where you could follow the project in the making and make it access-able for everyone.
What i like about the project is that it is not only serving my passion for Iceland and it’s music, but also that the main motivation behind it is the passion for it, not some commercial ideas to make money. I like the sharing idea behind it, the journalistic approach and of course the visual driven content that they want to produce. Kai just came back from a short trip to Iceland with some first impression, but it feels a bit as if he just came back into a financial disaster as most of the potential sponsors are not willing to really support the project and right now no one really knows if it’s gonna happen. As said in the beginning, someone has to pay the bills, especially when you want to make it available for free. So they made a shout out for support (also on Kai’s blog in german here) some days ago. The reactions were, let’s say, diverse, but i hope it helped to get some contacts and new potential sponsors to talk to.
But before we get to much into the depression of a great project maybe not gonna happen (Fight for it, guys!), let’s focus on the good and hope it’s gonna happen as for all of you that might not know much about the icelandic music scene, it is amazing and this idea for the project could easily have been mine. Iceland is a country of sheer magic and beauty and the music is one of the outlets that might happen when you grow up in an environment like that. I once read somewhere that Iceland is the country in the world with the most people who call themselves artists compared with the number of inhabitants. Great landscapes + great artists = amazing story to tell. So if you are from Iceland or know people in Iceland that maybe could help out with contacts, accommodation or anything else what could help, just drop the guys a line. They will be happy i guess. For more about the project go to Sonic Iceland.
