Some bands try to blend jazz and electronic music. Then there is HIST OG, who seem to have forgotten where one ends and the other begins. Listening to them feels as though someone has left a window open between two rooms. In one, three musicians are improvising. In the other, machines are processing memories, artificial lights, and landscapes that do not yet exist. The air moves freely between the two. Since 2017, the trio of Eiríkur Orri Ólafsson, Róberta Andersen, and Magnús Trygvason Eliassen has been building a universe of its own: a kind of intimate science fiction crafted from trumpet, guitars, synthesizers, percussion, and an unwavering belief that getting lost is also a way of arriving somewhere.

Because they come from Iceland, it would be tempting to talk about glaciers, mist, and volcanoes. But HIST OG’s music seems illuminated by a different kind of light: the glow of neon signs that still shine after the city has gone to sleep. There is something nocturnal about the way they play; something contemplative yet restless. Like walking without a fixed destination, knowing that the journey will be more interesting than the arrival. Their self-released albums — Days of Tundra (2019), Hits of (2022), and Holy Ghost of (2024) — do not function as collections of tracks so much as gateways into the same ever-changing landscape. A place where improvisation coexists with electronics, where jazz ceases to be a genre and becomes an attitude, and where melodies appear and disappear as though they do not wish to be captured.

Perhaps that explains why HIST OG are so difficult to describe precisely. They are a band, certainly. But they also seem like a process. An ongoing conversation between three musicians who have spent years performing alongside some of the most important names in the Icelandic music scene and who have chosen to carve out a space for themselves to explore what happens when no one expects them to arrive at a conclusion. Some bands offer answers. HIST OG prefer to ask questions. And fortunately, they are still in no hurry to answer them.
 

Èlia Blasco

Saxophonist and musicologist