The Reykjavík duo behind one album that stood almost alone in Icelandic industrial music, and a freezer-room collaboration with The Hafler Trio.
Reptilicus formed in Reykjavík at the end of 1988, when Guðmundur Ingi Markússon met Jóhann Eiríksson. Markússon came from the electro-industrial group Svölurnar; Eiríksson had played in the experimental group Huus with Paul Lydon and Laura Valentino, who joined the new duo for its first concert on 12 January 1989. The name arrived a few days after the first session, borrowed from a 1961 Danish-American monster film. Their first "record", Tat was asi (1989), was a joke: old LPs and their sleeves painted black, packed with two black balloons and instructions for performing the songs. About ten copies were made.
Crusher of Bones followed in the autumn of 1990 on the duo's own Product 8 label. Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, the producer linked with Þeyr, Psychic TV and Current 93, recorded and mixed it in about ten days; Guðlaugur Kristinn Óttarsson played guitar and Birgir Baldursson percussion. British distribution came through People Who Can't, the company that became World Serpent, so the LP was listed beside Whitehouse, Coil, Current 93 and Nurse With Wound. Current 93 and the poet Sjón shared the bill at the release concert. A CD edition with extra material appeared in 1996, and Artoffact reissued it again in 2022.
In 1991 the duo met The Hafler Trio's Andrew M. McKenzie, who was visiting Iceland with Carl Michael von Hausswolff. Early in 1992 they recorded together in the freezer of a derelict slaughterhouse, with Indriði Einarsson of Inferno 5, and sampled and reworked the results. Designer Time, credited to Reptilicus and The Hafler Trio, came out on Staalplaat in early 1994; its title is a pun on designer drugs. A second Staalplaat CD, A. Duke / O (1995), reworked an album planned for 1991, with McKenzie as a third member.
Later work came at longer intervals: the 7" Initial Conditions (2010) on Yatra Arts, with a remix by the German project Senking; Music for Tectonics (2013) for the Electronic Music Foundation; Unison (2018) with Senking on Artoffact, which has since reissued Designer Time (2021) and Crusher of Bones (2022).
I keep Reptilicus at Tier III: a small Icelandic catalogue, but one whose first album came out of the same circle as Psychic TV and Current 93, and whose work with McKenzie belongs to the Staalplaat end of the European network.
VAGO · c. the Anthropocene