№ 21 • In Gamla Bíó with Æla

Knaldemand with Æla @ Gamla Bíó
Pic: Rúnar Sigurður Sigurjónsson

The music itself is built on angular, build-release dynamics and the howling, shrieking voice of frontman Halli Valli, who starts dressed in a suit and tie and ends doing laps of the room on someone’s shoulders in head-to-toe glitter and a Snow White dress. The projected visuals are of male and female mouths alternately fellating and devouring bananas, and screaming bearded faces covered in smashed fruit. A person dressed as a horse sometimes wanders around the stage aimlessly, and ends the set butt-naked, bouncing up and down, with his dangling cock spinning in circles. It’s like David Lynch directing Shellac vs. Kurt Cobain’s drag phase, through a filter of Flaming Lips weirdness. And who the fuck wouldn’t wanna see that? Æla are at their wild, unhinged best here, and it’s a joy to behold. – Airwaves Day One: Terror In The Chest, Taking It In The Ass & Unexpected Horse Dick - The Reykjavik Grapevine

№ 15 • Heste ringer ikke hjem

De løber hjem.

Once upon a time the horseman went missing. He found a phone and went to his own meditation program. This is the outcome.

№ 11 • Dark Days

He had to get home. He had no idea where home was but he knew he had to get there. By any means neccesery. He thought the metal bird would bring him home, it didn’t, it just took him farther away from home. It took him to a scary place of horned animals and tall mountains. He had to go back so he could find the way home.

What was this thing following him. Some kind of bird. Beautiful bird. She was mean to him. She tied him up and hit him. She made him do things he didn’t like. He didn’t like her.

What was this thing in the tree, making those aweful sounds and eating like… like… he didn’t know what. It looked like a gnomish angel. It attacked him. Called itself his consciousness. Told him to stop doing those things. He didn’t understand. so he ran.

He’s running towards his home.

He hopes.

№ 10 • Knaldemand's Conscience

Knaldemand is lying in a sofa with a blowup doll straddling him. Next to him is an angel on his knees with his hands raised to the air, screaming to the Heavens. The floor is covered in empty beer cans. There is a big bottle of lube and a blow up sheep next to the sofa.

What’s that rubber sound?

Knaldemand is at home, enjoying the pleasures of life. His room smells

of whiskey and beer, but there is something salty in the air as well.

He is not alone.

He doesn’t know if he is doing something wrong, not even the angel

appears screaming in agony on the floor.

His female companion doesn’t complain, neither did the lamb just few

minutes earlier. His collection of bras are watching, the pink one is a favourite. Even when the angel looks away, the bras follow every move of Knaldemand. The bottle of oil was still there, waiting for it’s purpose.

When the angel appeared, he didn’t know if he should stop or just keep on going, he really didn’t know what to do. But the angel keeps on screaming, making life difficult for Knaldemand,

Who is this angel and what is he doing in my room?

Is he going to steal my collection of bras?

I hope not!

Maybe it’s just a regular mid week dream for Knaldemand.

№ 9 • Emotions in Sheep

Knaldemand is sleeping in his suit, all wet, next to a boat in the sun.

He always liked them. Those fluffy four legged beasts. They just can’t float. Which make them lousy floatation devices. Which makes Him sad. Because He loves them so. Because they are fluffy balls of fun and they make cute sounds.

Why can’t they just float. So he can sail the nine seas.

Instead they just sink.

Into the abyss.

№ 6 • Hester spiser ikke fisk

He’s hungry.

So very hungry.

He’s been eating grass but that feeling of hunger isn’t going away. It is like the grass isn’t enough anymore. That he needs something else to sate his hunger.

Something meaty.

So he goes out to find something meaty to eat. But where can he find such a thing?

The forest sounds like a good place to start looking. He has no idea why he thinks that but he trusts his instincts. His instincts has served him well in the past.

So off into the forest he goes. To find some meaty food. Maybe a cat or a fish. A catfish perhaps.

He doesn’t really care what he finds to eat, just as long as he will stop being hungry.

№ 5 • Human Dreams

A diptych of Knaldmand, pregnant and in human clothes showing his belly, on left he is jumping and on right he is standing.

It had a dream. It isn’t used to dreams. At least not these kinds of dreams.

Human dreams.

Before, It would dream about green meadows, of being ridden around, of things that had happened.

Not anymore.

Now It dreams about things that might happen, imaginary things. Things that can’t happen in the waking world. Impossible things.

Like being pregnant.

It had a dream that It was pregnant. It was just prancing around, with it its pregnant belly out for all to see. It was weird, being pregnant, but it also felt good.

It felt right.

It felt like the Waking world is the wrong world and that in the Dreaming It can be right, It can be whole. Whole with its pregnant belly and green hair.

It wonders if maybe It has had it wrong all along. That the Dreaming is the Waking and the Waking is the Dreaming.

It shakes that thought away. It can’t be. It remembers going to sleep and dreaming about being pregnant. It has to be a dream. It has to.

Because if this is the Dreaming then what is the dream It just had?

№ 3 • Faraway Island

Knaldemand is poking his head out of a window in a run down old building standing at the foot of a mountain.

He dreamt he went on a trip to some faraway island where the wind was cold and the landscape barren and inhospitable. He felt like he had been there before with the wind blowing over the black desert sands and the biting cold on its furry face and bare body.

It all felt comforting. He felt like he belonged there, that this is where he was supposed to be.

He found an old stable that looked abandoned. As he went inside it a flood of memories surged forward. Memories of being taken care of, shoed, and combed. Memories of being ridden outside on fields of green grass and desert roads.

He missed it.

As he was reliving those memories she walked in.

She was so beautiful as she stood there in the doorway looking at him. With out a word she saddled him up, put shoes on his hands and feet and took him out for a ride.

They rode across fields of green grass and desert roads. Under waterfalls and over rivers of ice. It was glorious and how he wished it would last forever.

Then he woke up.

№ 2 • Used

Knaldemand is being ridden around by a mode on her underwear in a muddy field during winter.

He still wonders about his first dream, was it a human dream… What was the name of the girl that he woke up with. Why? He only remembers the cold, soft mud of horse shit. Still in the dreams, he wonders what he will need to feed himself tomorrow.

№ 1 • Knaldemand's dream

Ever wonder your dreams would be if you were a man horse…

It used to be a horse. Just a regular horse, like all the other horses out there. Four legs, hoofs, tail, fur, teeth that never stop growing, huge penis, the whole horse shebang.

But then, one day, it woke up in a human body. No fur anymore, toes and fingers, no tail, tiny penis. Mysteriously, it still had a horse head so it didn’t even gain the human brain power. That seemed like a loose-loose situation to the human horse thing, or is it horsehuman? Homan? Hurse?

It doesn’t know.

What it does know is that it doesn’t like this. It doesn’t like it one bit. It doesn’t even know where it is.

It is inside somewhere, lying under something, something soft and warm, and there seems to be one of those humans lying next to it. A female, it thinks.

What is it doing there next to it? How did they end up sleeping in the same place?

These questions, constant questions, feel strange to it. It isn’t used to questioning the world like this. Wondering what’s behind the hill, why it rains. It just wants to be at the farm, spending the days outside, eating, sleeping, being ridden by those human things.

Ridden like a horse.

Not having those questions all the time.

Like a human.

But it is a human now, at least partly, so that’s probably why it is having those questions and maybe why this woman is here.

The woman that just woke up.