Duo turns old poems into music

The married couple Rakel Björk Björnsdóttir and Garðar Borgþórsson formed the music duo ÞAU during the pandemic and have spent several summers touring Iceland, mbl.is reports.

Rakel was an actress at Borgarleikhúsið, a theatre, while Garðar worked there as a sound technician. When the theatre closed, they needed something to do and began creating music together.

Their first album, ÞAU takes the Westfjords, was released in 2022 and features 12 songs based on poems by poets from the Westfjords. The project grew beyond their initial expectations, Rakel said.

“You could almost say that we fell in love with these beautiful texts,” she said.

That led to the idea of focusing on each region in turn. The album ÞAU takes the North was released the following year, and the duo is now working on a third album featuring poets from South Iceland.

“A lot of research goes into this, finding the right poems and the stories we want to tell,” Rakel said. “We are both theatre people, and it is important to us that the poems have a certain depth. These are old texts, many of them around 150 years old, although we also sometimes look at contemporary poets. It is a mixture.”

The duo often works with poems that have been found in library basements and are frequently forgotten, Rakel said.

Rakel and Garðar first toured the country to perform in 2021 with their friend Ingimar Ingimarsson, who played the keyboard. ÞAU also toured in the summers of 2022 and 2023, returning to the road this summer.

In 2023, they brought their daughter Glóey, who was about five months old at the time. Rakel’s parents, Björn Gunnar Birgisson and Freyja Björk Gunnarsdóttir, joined the family to help with equipment and childcare.

The family has travelled widely around Iceland this summer. When Rakel spoke to mbl.is, the duo was preparing to leave for Dalvík, where it was due to perform that evening. The final concert in the current tour will take place at Ægir 220 in Hafnarfjörður on Friday, August 14.