The Beautiful Side Of A Disaster - Eyjafjallajokull

A dark ash cloud looms over the Icelandic south coast April 17, 2010. (REUTERS/Ingolfur Juliusson)Lightning streaks across the sky as lava flows from a volcano in Eyjafjallajokul April 17, 2010. (REUTERS/Lucas Jackson)View seen from a road leading to the Eyjafjallajokull volcano as it continues to billow smoke and ash during an eruption on April 17, 2010. (HALLDOR KOLBEINS/AFP/Getty Images)The first of 3 photos by Olivier Vandeginste, taken 10 km east of Hvolsvollur at a distance 25 km from the Eyjafjallajokull craters on April 18th, 2010. Lightning and motion-blurred ash appear in this 15-second exposure. (© Olivier VandeginsteAs banal as this may sound; Nature is the greatest artist. 

It's amazing how despite the fact that we are accustomed to seeing such imagery, through films and TV, we still stand in absolute awe when it's the real thing! Literally breathtaking (and show-stopping).

For more and much larger images go here. 

Móa

In 1999 an icelandic singer, by the name of Móa, released an album called Universal. The album did relatively well in Europe providing Móa a certain amount of attention, (plus a modelling gig for Calvin Klein Jeans), and while she went on and announced new collaborations and more experimental sounds to be released in 2001, she abruptly disappeared...

Poof! Nada! Gone! Her website was down after a while, internet searches returned scarce results, (I have to say, I got to know about an animal called moa which is nearly extinct though) and the less I found, the more I wanted! I only found one music video on youtube and the sound isn't even synced with the video. Now, here we are 10+ years after the release of "Universal", Móa is still a ghost artist*, and Universal is still in my top-5 album list.

A bit about Universal & Móa: Initially I should mention that she looks a lot like Uma Thurman. Her music moves in the same neighborhood as Bjork's but deviates from being a cheap imitation. Móa's genre seems to be taking it's own course right at the point when she blatantly infuses it with jazz and a lighter pop-ish feel than that of Bjork's. Others referred to her music as a lukewarm fusion of Jazz, Massive Attack, and Bjork, but I tend to disagree... She simply did what any ambitious, experimenting, young musician (bearing Móa's Jazz background) would do, while her very particular high pitched voicedifferentiates, by far,her sound from all the aforementioned artists. Can't Forget You, and Overcome are my very favorite off Universal, with Memory Cloud, Joy & Pain and Rockets being some awesome tracks too.

Electro-Jazz-Pop never sounded so ...cool! And considering the fact that this album was released before Y2K, she did a pretty good job at guessing what the sounds of the 00s would be!

*In 2006 Móa worked under the name "Lace" to create Zeitgeist (which I'm about to purchase off iTunes, as soon as I make sure that she is actually involved in it). From the snippets I managed to listen to, this one seems to be sort of inferior to Universal, but I'm not being judgmental before reception of an overall listening.