Knackered is finding frequencies of compassion in a fractured world

This is one of Iceland Airwaves’ most hotly-anticipated performances. One in, one out. Strands of UK rave, 2000s RnB and the droning particular to a supermarket fridge are all hardwired into knackered’s singular world; alone, she DJs with almost child-like delight, bounding across the stage and making heart-shaped arches with her arms, smiling at us like sharing her music tonight is the only thing in the world worth doing.

Ida Schuften Juhl’s new project scales altitudes, one minute in the bass-heavy dirt with the ceaseless, forward motion of the animal brain, the next, gathering frost way up in the pop heavens. With her debut EP fyi having been released by the female-focused “creative nucleus” marvaða earlier this year, already Juhl can count Björk among her champions who invited her to play as part of her Full Moon series. The Danish-born artist is also one of the original forces behind Reykjavík’s Post-dreifing collective which championed an ethos of “Do It Together” (D.I.T rather than D.I.Y) – and knackered is the next incarnation of that same immovable spirit of togetherness.

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I meet Juhl at her studio in hafnar.haus, a sprawling “creative playground” where an entire community of like-minded artists have found a home. Its several stories high, a rabbit warren of studios and communal spaces which seems unending. Artists work next to musicians, next to craftsmen, entrepreneurs and filmmakers. While Juhl disappears to put on make-up for our photoshoot, I lose track of her – her voice calling to me is almost nymph-like in its echoing corridors.

Her studio is a small room with old, ornate furniture and countless show posters taped to the walls. It’s important to find a place of your own, she tells me, and it started when she left Denmark in search of it in the northernmost capital city in the world. “There’s a smalltown mentality here that connects you deeply to the people around you,” she tells me. “The community here is so strong.”

Reykjavík allowed her to explore the outer reaches of her ambition has an electronic artist. She was briefly in a techno trio called Sodill, before experimenting as a singer-songwriter-producer under the name IDK IDA. knackered arrived as a much-needed creative outlet in balance with her role as a Technical Director at the Iceland Dance Company. “[IDK IDA] was very heavy and intense to perform because it felt so vulnerable,” she shares. “As soon as you’re a female electronic musician who is also a singer, you’re discredited in an odd manner or perceived in a particular way. People will ask you who produced your beats, and people will mansplain things to you in soundchecks. I just got so fed up of it. I really needed a project that was playful and let me express a bit of attitude.”

Knackered’s musical birth had the Post-dreifing community as its safety net, with the project’s first track “chatbot slang” appearing on its compilation record Drullumall #4. It’s a track almost dubstep-adjacent in its reptilian coldness and strange, subterranean textures. The name came to her after performing at the collective’s arts festival, Hátíðni, in the small hours of the morning completely sober. And so, naturally, she was knackered.

In her mind, fyi’s opening track “rubbr thr0n” is the project’s intentional beginning. “It’s very sassy,” she smiles, “and I get to choose the texture of my throne and its mine. You can share it, but you can’t tell me what it’s going to be. No one can tell you how to present yourself. So it was a breaking from expectations and a lot of fears and insecurities. It was a very powerful start.”

Though the EP was designed as an act of empowerment for Juhl, she feels its higher calling is to empower her audience to see themselves reflected in it. “I’m so desperately trying to abolish the IDM term,” she says. The genre was assigned in the early 90s for electronic music which focused more on ‘cerebral engagement’, often pairing with artists including Aphex Twin and Autechre. “It was a very male universe, and it was males writing about male electronic music – you know, the whole lone male genius who is too brilliant to participate in electronic music itself. It’s such a problematic self-perception. And obviously, intelligent dance music implies there is lesser, unintelligent dance music. It’s part of an old system, and I realised I didn’t fit into this storytelling – so how could I claim a space within it?”

Knackered’s musical birth had the Post-dreifing community as its safety net, with the project’s first track “chatbot slang” appearing on its compilation record Drullumall #4. It’s a track almost dubstep-adjacent in its reptilian coldness and strange, subterranean textures. The name came to her after performing at the collective’s arts festival, Hátíðni, in the small hours of the morning completely sober. And so, naturally, she was knackered.

In her mind, fyi’s opening track “rubbr thr0n” is the project’s intentional beginning. “It’s very sassy,” she smiles, “and I get to choose the texture of my throne and its mine. You can share it, but you can’t tell me what it’s going to be. No one can tell you how to present yourself. So it was a breaking from expectations and a lot of fears and insecurities. It was a very powerful start.”

Though the EP was designed as an act of empowerment for Juhl, she feels its higher calling is to empower her audience to see themselves reflected in it. “I’m so desperately trying to abolish the IDM term,” she says. The genre was assigned in the early 90s for electronic music which focused more on ‘cerebral engagement’, often pairing with artists including Aphex Twin and Autechre. “It was a very male universe, and it was males writing about male electronic music – you know, the whole lone male genius who is too brilliant to participate in electronic music itself. It’s such a problematic self-perception. And obviously, intelligent dance music implies there is lesser, unintelligent dance music. It’s part of an old system, and I realised I didn’t fit into this storytelling – so how could I claim a space within it?”

Juhl describes herself as a “small town girl”, and so she had never grown up with access to an electronic scene. Her music is what happens when electronic music is nurtured in a bedroom rather than the club, the product of an internal world. She reflects on when the dancefloor was a politically radical space, but in her experience in Denmark, the club scene she inherited was broken. “It was incredibly disgusting,” she says. “So unsafe for anyone who isn’t a cis white man. I come from a culture which makes the club feels unsafe, and I’ve had the most uncomfortable experiences. You have to actively implement values of how we interact and behave around each other. Nothing changes unless you verbalise these things.”

It was only when she moved to Iceland that she found her people; a different fabric and way of being. “When I came here, I found amazing people who believed that despite me not having proven myself, they perceived me as someone who had something to offer. I was welcomed to just participate: ‘Do you want to play at my gig next week?’ That was huge. There’s an incredible network of friends here who don’t see each other as competition; they’re always asking how they can help you out, what do you need.”

Though her music is chronically bound to the online world, humanity is hardwired into knackered’s genetic code. “luvuUu” captures the hyperactive overdrive of our attention being demanded at every moment. “I get so overwhelmed and stop replying to my friends,” she tells me. “I’m a notorious ghoster on social media. It’s too much. The track is about me accepting myself for not having the capacity to always be available – because it’s always easier to extend that compassion to your friends. In a way, it’s for myself, but it’s also to tell my friends that they are still very loved even if I am not always present.”

Juhl is now 31-years-old, and she feels that her music gives her the grace she denied herself with IDK IDA. “People have always told me this, and it’s fucking annoying, but everything really is better than ever at this age. When you’re in your twenties you’re in the hard bit, you’re still trying to find your place and you’ll encounter brutal truths you don’t have the tools to deal with. And of course, you’ll encounter tough lessons your entire life, but you’ll learn to deal with those with more softness. You’ll reach out to your community and your friends and the people around you.”

When fyi was underway last winter, nothing in her world was going right. She had a big breakup and had to find a new place to live, had quit her job with the Iceland Dance Company and had enrolled in a Master’s programme – and she was trying to move forward with a new sound. “I’ve been on my knees, overwhelmed, and I don’t feel as though I have to try and hide that anymore. I think a lot of people never make it there, necessarily. They’re in office settings and don’t have the freedom to do this, but maybe offices need to chill. Come on, we are literally just people,” Juhl says. “We break our backs making money for someone else. Neoliberalism has exploded. I’ve always felt so much shame that I can’t just have a ‘normal’ job – but so far, so good. Life is just lifeing, is my favourite catchphrase.”

“hot and bothrd (depression talking)” is the third track on the EP which captures the restless internal monologue of a mind at war with itself. “You think you’re on your way,” a voice taunts over a beat on a helter-skelter downward spiral. “It’s such an anthem in my life,” Juhl notes. “You feel bothered in the sense that you’re uncomfortable and you might not realise what the root of the discomfort is. I’ve had depression for many years. I’m fine now, things have gotten a lot easier, but realising that the voice telling you you’re alone is just the depression talking means that you can separate it from your reality. You would never be as big of an asshole to your friends as you are to yourself. It’s pretty fucking tough, but it’s powerful to turn that focus and realise that you wouldn’t do that to someone else. Maybe you can catch yourself before you do it to yourself. I thought it would be nice to put that as a reminder in this track through the very simple phrasing.”

Juhl’s final track on the EP is a definitive act of forgiving and forgetting – almost. “I think it’s pretty rude to expect people to do this if they’ve been wronged,” she says. “How do I find it within me to forgive something when it’s another person’s responsibility to sit with? You get to choose how you deal with the hard things however suits you best. I want to encourage people to deal with something in their own way.”

Computer music has been the ultimate tool of empowerment in her life. “It gives so much freedom, and it’s a direct translator of your creative ideas. The same material will never sound the same in a different person’s hands. I’m interested in how accessible computer music is; I love to hear voices which might’ve never made it to the public in the past,” she shares. “It took away the gatekeepers in many ways – but the gatekeepers are back.”

You won’t find fyi on the dominant streaming platforms. It exists only on Bandcamp, and in physical formats. “Someone has figured out how to capitalise on creative outlets,” Juhl explains. “Spotify had the chance to make a utopian ecosystem for independent artists and musicians, but they decided to choose capital gain over artistic exploration. They probably perceive themselves as part of the solution, but here we are, being gatekept by what they sneak in under their ‘Terms of Use’. Even SoundCloud is doing it.”

Her self-described “hyperinterest” is digital infrastructures, and she can talk at length about the politics and inequality of our current systems. Solutions are being tried and tested by new platforms to return the power to the artists and users, running on a cooperative basis. “It’s the only way to go about it because we all have digital lives,” she says. “We rely on it. We need somewhere to store our digital assets. Yes, we have the cloud. But what if the cloud shuts you out because they changed the terms of use and you have the ‘wrong’ political opinion? There are so many problematic things about our digital reality right now, but if you have a cooperative, you can’t sell something to a private entity until every single person agrees. There is a lot more space for ethics in an ecosystem like that.”

Juhl has been experimenting with alternative forms of release, including NFC mini CDs inspired by the K-pop industry. She is in the process of raising funds, but it’s a concept she has been working on all year. “I’m so extremely excited!” she shares. “I find a lot inspiration in K-pop because though it’s a hardcore industry where people are taking advantage of as with any other, they don’t necessarily see things through the Western lens. It’s an opportunity to protect people’s digital information because instead of downloading the tracks to your laptop where you will need to find somewhere to store it, the idea is to self-host It away from Amazon servers and problematic infrastructures because the chip itself is host the tracks. Or it’s a URL where the chip is needed to access the website.”

Though she appreciates the ambition of the idea, her friends at hafnar.haus – who can code and develop digital infrastructures – are working with her to create a decentralised store system that is backed up. And crucially, out of the hands of multi-national conglomerates. Next year, Juhl will be launching a new contemporary electronic music label which will reinvigorate the Post-dreifing ethos and bring her utopian vision clearly into view. “I would love to reintroduce new, physical ways to support artists and get a token of the cultural thing you’re participating in,” she adds. “I find it so daunting, but I’m in a fortunate position here in Iceland that people will offer their assistance. We want to see each other succeed.”

When I ask what she feels she has learned through bringing knackered to life this year, it comes back to the very thing that guided her to Reykjavík in the first place. “I have the most incredible people around me,” she says. “I’ve learned that what I create actually resonates with people – and that message is that you should be able to come to my shows, however you are. You can stand in the back and not dance, or you can stand in the front and not dance. You can dance weirdly, whatever, just come as you are. There are no rules in electronic music. I love being accessible and embracing people through slightly inaccessible music. This is what IDM music was missing: people were not in the equation. We are just people, and we need other people. We need to find spaces to bring us together, and I’m willing to make that effort.”