The Future of Live Music in Reykjavík; Hendrix Leads New Study that Combines Data and Industry Insights
Reykjavík - 26 March 2026:
Huldunótur, a Reykjavík-based design and research practice, is leading a new research project for Music City Reykjavík examining the current state and future of live music performance in the city. The project is directed by Michael Hendrix, musician, designer, and educator, in collaboration with the Research Center for Creative Industries (RSSG).
Reykjavík’s live music scene is facing a range of structural challenges, including the closure of several important venues in recent months. While these closures have prompted public discussion, there remains a lack of reliable data and research on how music events, venue conditions, the housing market, tourism, and broader urban development interact.
JFDR at Fríkirkjan, 2025
“In my work with Music City Reykjavík, I focus on supporting the conditions for live music performance in the city. Quantitative data on the state of Reykjavík’s music scene has long been limited, making it more difficult for musicians, venues, and music schools to advocate for their interests and negotiate working conditions. This needs to change. The agreement between Music City Reykjavík and the research partners is a step in the right direction, for the benefit of the music community and the public,” says Ása Dýradóttir, project manager for Music City Reykjavík.
The project is grounded in two primary sources: statistical data from the software company Mobilitus and in-depth interviews with concert promoters, venue operators, and other key stakeholders. The dataset spans music events from 2022 to 2025, while the qualitative research explores the operational realities of venues, including financial pressures, housing constraints, and long-term ecosystem dynamics.
By combining quantitative and qualitative methods, the research aims to establish a robust knowledge base for Music City Reykjavík and the broader cultural sector.
Michael Hendrix notes: “As a professor working in cultural industries and design, and as a practicing musician, I feel strongly about the importance of this work. While challenges within the live music ecosystem are widely acknowledged, the absence of consistent and systematic data has limited the ability to inform policy. This project establishes a baseline across both data types, creating the foundation for an ongoing annual record that can support future evaluation and decision-making.”
The research is currently underway and is expected to be completed in spring 2026. As part of the longer-term approach, Huldunótur and its partners aim to establish a recurring series of annual “micro-interviews” with venue operators, musicians, and audiences. This longitudinal layer will help track change over time and identify early signals of emerging challenges and opportunities within Reykjavík’s live music ecosystem.
- hendrix@invisiblenotes.com
Two Beats Ahead Live! Returns for Season Two in Reykjavík
Reykjavík - 23 March 2026:
Huldunótur announces the second season of Two Beats Ahead Live!, recorded in front of a live audience in Reykjavík and hosted by R. Michael Hendrix. The new season shifts focus from entrepreneurial practice toward creative leadership—examining how artists, producers, and cultural organizers enable others to do their best work.
Season Two brings together a set of accomplished collaborators: individuals whose work is defined not only by their own output, but by their ability to build context around others. Across music, production, and community platforms, these guests operate as curators, facilitators, and catalysts—making the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
This focus reflects a broader condition. As creative tools become widely accessible and AI accelerates production across disciplines, differentiation increasingly depends on judgment, context, and the ability to work with and through others. In this environment, those who stand out are rarely operating alone; they are embedded in communities of care, trust, and shared ambition.
Episode 1: Hildur Maral
The season opens with Hildur Maral, an Icelandic-Iranian music industry executive, artist manager, and co-founder of OPIA Community. With over two decades of experience spanning artist, event, and label management—including work with Universal Music Group, Coachella, and Roskilde Festival—she brings a systems-level perspective to artist and community development. She is also part of the management team for composer and producer Ólafur Arnalds.
The conversation examines the launch of OPIA and the relationship between artist development and community building. Maral describes artist development as analogous to dating—requiring intuition, timing, and mutual alignment—and outlines different modes of leadership: foreground, background, and side-by-side. The discussion also addresses the role of both formal education and experiential learning, drawing on her time at Kaospilot and Berklee College of Music. The episode concludes with a reflection on grassroots organizations as communities of care.
Episode 2: Sunna Margrét
Episode two features Sunna Margrét, whose work bridges experimental pop, electronic composition, and melodic songwriting. Her debut album Finger on Tongue received international critical attention, including coverage from The Quietus.
In 2019, she co-founded No Salad Records, a Lausanne-based, vinyl-focused label operating as a curatorial platform for independent and experimental work. In this episode, the discussion centers on her curatorial approach across live performance and recorded formats. She reflects on touring as a testing ground, where performance becomes a laboratory for constraint and decision-making. The conversation also considers her 2025 performance at Iceland Airwaves, the discipline of sequencing a set list, and the parallels between live and recorded curation. The founding of No Salad Records is positioned as a deliberate counterpoint to prevailing industry structures, emphasizing independence and artistic intent.
Episode 3: Úlfur Hansson
The third episode features Úlfur Hansson, a composer and multidisciplinary artist working across contemporary classical music, experimental electronics, and instrument design. His collaborations include artists such as Björk, Jónsi, Ólöf Arnalds, and Anna von Hausswolff, with performances spanning international festivals and institutions including the Iceland Symphony Orchestra.
The conversation frames creative leadership as the act of creating conditions rather than directing outcomes. Hansson reflects on his shift toward improvisational practice, where leadership becomes facilitative—defining a structure and allowing emergence. Through his collaboration with Gyða Valtýsdóttir in the duo RÓR, he describes leadership as shared perception and alignment around intangible goals. He also discusses instrument design as a form of constraint-based leadership, enabling more intuitive interaction with sound. Across film, production, and collaboration, he moves fluidly between roles, at times serving broader systems and at others supporting individual artistic visions.
About the Series
Two Beats Ahead Live! is a live-recorded conversation series exploring creativity across disciplines. Season Two was launched in front of an audience on January 7, 2026 at Huldunótur in Reykjavík.
- hendrix@invisiblenotes.com
Designing Björk’s 60th Birthday Cover for the Reykjavík Grapevine
Reykjavík - 14 November 2025:
Huldunótur is pleased to announce the release of a new cover for the Reykjavík Grapevine, created to commemorate Björk’s 60th birthday. The commission originated from an informal creative practice: designer R. Michael Hendrix had been producing personal collage “remixes” of past Grapevine covers, shared casually on weekends. After the work caught the attention of the publication, editor, Jón Trausti Sigurðarson invited Hendrix to design the cover for the milestone issue.
The assignment centered on celebrating Björk’s legacy while offering a contemporary visual interpretation. Hendrix began with one of the most recognizable elements of Björk’s recent visual identity—her masks. Representing influences ranging from flora and birds to masquerade and omote, the masks provided a clear conceptual and compositional anchor. They also offered a way to reference her full studio discography, an idea integral to marking this landmark year.
Hendrix developed a mask structure composed of nine segments, each corresponding to one of Björk’s nine studio albums. The geometry was guided by a vintage swirling grid sourced from his personal archive of technical drawings—an element that aligned naturally with the angle of Björk’s face and introduced a sense of movement. The final illustration blends vector forms with colors and textures informed by the album artworks, designed to evoke without distracting.
To reinforce the editorial context, the background incorporates a subtle map of Iceland and directional marker—supportive elements that situate the story while maintaining focus on Björk herself.
“The goal was to create a cover that honored Björk’s impact, acknowledged her continual evolution, and felt visually grounded in the present,” said Hendrix. “It was important that the image function as both tribute and interpretation.”
The final cover is seen on the November 7 issue of the Reykjavík Grapevine.
- hendrix@invisiblenotes.com
Book Cover for Congratulations You’re Human by Sigga Soffía Níelsdóttir
Reykjavík - 31 October 2025:
Huldunótur is pleased to announce the design of the cover for Congratulations, You’re Human, the newly translated work by multidisciplinary Icelandic artist Sigga Soffía Níelsdóttir.
To begin the process, Sigga Soffía shared an envelope filled with personal ephemera from her year of fighting cancer while pregnant: hospital wristbands, pressed flowers, Polaroids, and photographs taken from her hospital bed. The materials offered an intimate window into the emotional world of the book, which navigates fear, exhaustion, dark humor, and the strange beauty of surviving. Hendrix approached the project with a sense of responsibility and care for the deeply personal nature of the content.
One hospital photograph became the conceptual foundation for the final cover. In it, Sigga Soffía lies in bed in a hospital gown, her arm raised as if mid-gesture. The moment carried a quiet humor and resilience; Hendrix immediately imagined the gesture as a kind of toast to the absurdity of illness. This interplay of fragility, strength, and wit shaped the visual direction.
Hendrix scanned the ephemera and began creating collages by hand—fast and intuitive explorations that generated the initial compositions. Additional digital variations were developed at the author’s request, one of which became the back cover. Yet the team consistently returned to the original composition, which ultimately aligned with the publisher’s vision.
Front Cover Back Cover
In the final stages, the champagne flute imagined in the earliest drafts was replaced with a glass of milk out of respect for the cancer society—a shift that preserved the tone of the image while adding a slightly surreal, yet fitting, quality. Various Polaroids were tested to match the emotional register of the book, and a whimsical black rabbit—referenced in the stage adaptation—was incorporated to balance gravity with lightness.
“The hardest part was tone,” said Hendrix. “The cover had to feel hopeful and a little punchy—clever enough to signal humor, but without slipping into irony. We wanted something delicate but not fragile. Something strong.”
The result is a cover that honors both the vulnerability and resilience at the heart of the book, reflecting Sigga Soffía’s multidisciplinary spirit—dancer, choreographer, poet, playwright, fireworks designer, and founder of Eldblóm Elixir.
Designing the cover became, in spirit, a toast—raised not with champagne, but with a glass of milk—to the courage, absurdity, and endurance of being human.
- hendrix@invisiblenotes.com
Introducing Two New MA Design Courses at Iceland University of the Arts
Reykjavík - 16 August 2025:
Designer, author, and educator, R. Michael Hendrix, is introducing two new courses in the MA Design program at the Iceland University of the Arts (Listaháskóli Íslands) this fall: Team-based Design and Contextual Research. Drawing on 15 years of hands-on design leadership at IDEO (2008–2023), Hendrix’s curriculum advances skills essential for today’s graduate design education.
"Design education needs to prepare students for the realities of collaborative, multidisciplinary work and equip them with deep research skills to uncover human-centered insights," said Hendrix. "These courses are designed to deliver exactly that—practical methods students can apply immediately in their practice."
Team-based Design
A nine-week course focused on design collaboration in both multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts. Students will learn to define and adapt team roles, build trust, manage group dynamics, and establish effective team rituals. The course also covers co-design with external stakeholders, creating productive shared workspaces, and managing collective authorship—key competencies for collaborative design projects in professional environments.
Contextual Research
A five-week intensive introducing students to contextual research methods in design. Through ethnographic fieldwork, observation, interviews, and analogous research, students will uncover cultural, social, and environmental factors influencing behavior. The course emphasizes identifying “latent needs” and synthesizing findings into actionable design opportunities—critical skills for developing products, services, and systems that respond to real-world contexts.
Hendrix, co-author of Two Beats Ahead: What Musical Minds Teach Us About Innovation and founder of Reykjavík-based design practice Huldunótur, has worked with clients including the White House, Nasdaq, and the GRAMMYs. His teaching experience spans Berklee College of Music, University of Tennessee, and Bifröst University.
The courses are open to MA Design students starting Fall 2025 and are part of the program’s ongoing commitment to advancing contemporary design education.
- hendrix@invisiblenotes.com
Hendrix featured in Morgunblaðið, Iceland’s largest newspaper
Reykjavík - 14 April 2025:
In a recent Morgunblaðið article by journalist and photographer Ásdís Ásgeirsdóttir (published April 13), American design and innovation expert Michael Hendrix shares his journey of relocating to Iceland and launching a new creative consultancy, Huldunótur.
R. Michael Hendrix by Ásdís Ásgeirsdóttir, 2025
The article notes that Hendrix, the former Global Design Director at innovation firm IDEO, now works with Icelandic businesses like Brauð & Co. and The Blue Lagoon, helping them unlock growth through design thinking, strategic innovation, and creative problem-solving.
In addition to his consulting work, Hendrix is an accomplished musician. He recently released his sixth solo album, Yuks, produced with Icelandic composer Valgeir Sigurðsson, and hosts the podcast Two Beats Ahead Live, featuring interviews with leading Icelandic artists and creative entrepreneurs.
In the article Hendrix cites Iceland’s independent mindset and collaborative spirit as key reasons for making Reykjavík his home. He says, “I love being here. The cultural life is fantastic. The landscape inspires me. And there’s a certain mindset here that I really appreciate. That’s important to me. There’s something about the way Icelanders see the world that I connect with.”
Read an English adaptation of the interview on Iceland Monitor or read the original Icelandic article here.
- hendrix@invisiblenotes.com
Recent case studies from Huldunótur
Reykjavík - 27 March 2025:
Enjoy this round-up of recent work from Huldunótur.
Baking Culture into Growth Strategy
After a post-COVID growth spurt, the Brauð & Co. executive team streamlined operations, improving product consistency, strengthening finances, and enhancing the customer experience. With the business thriving, they set their sights on sustainable growth.
Huldunótur guided the leadership team through planning and discovery to codify cultural values, set growth objectives, and connect these actions to a communications plan. Over four months, we collaborated through group discussions, an executive offsite, and employee interviews. The result: clear 2025 objectives focused on bakery and logistical efficiencies, an employee handbook to uphold cultural values, and a communications plan to reinforce commitments.
The most public outcome is the handbook, a culture manifesto nicknamed No Rules, inspired by punk zines. Handmade collages illustrate Brauð’s values, reflecting its artisanal craft and nonconformist roots. Mobile-friendly and easy to understand, it fosters employee engagement while honoring Brauð’s fair-minded, collaborative work culture.
Brauð & Co’s culture handbook, by Huldunótur
Glow-ing Forward: Design Strategy for Skincare
Recognizing international growth opportunities, an Iceland-based skincare brand enlisted Huldunótur to lead a multi-day strategic workshop focused on market data, field insights, and customer feedback to identify and prioritize expansion strategies, including regional marketing and branding. Aware of the risks and rewards of scaling, the brand spent a month preparing for the sessions, reviewing past market research, customer insights, and manufacturing capabilities. Decisions and commitments from the sessions shaped the milestones and budgets of a three-year strategic plan.
Powering Up Customer Insights in Gaming
Knowing your customer is essential to improving your products. An Iceland-based game company hired Huldunótur to teach its teams design thinking research methods for gaining customer insights and defining new opportunites. Because business training is often dry and ineffective, the month-long workshop series focused on immediate application. Employees collaborated in teams and applied what they learned to business opportunities. This program has given the teams confidence to engage with their customers in fresh ways to shape their design and development pipeline.
- hendrix@invisiblenotes.com
Hendrix to speak at Conversation on Creative Industries
Reykjavík - 25 March 2025:
Rannsóknarsetur skapandi greina (Iceland’s Research Center for Creative Industries) has announced the speakers for its next event in the "Conversation on Creative Industries" series. Part of the DesignMarch program, this event features R. Michael Hendrix, designer and professor, who will discuss design thinking and its potential in Iceland.
“Design thinking is a transformative methodology that uses creative mindsets to identify new opportunities that address human needs while also building value for organizations,” Hendrix says. “It is particularly effective at designing intangibles—things that are not physical—such as strategy, culture, and service. While design practice in Iceland is exceptional, the broad application of design thinking is nascent. There are significant opportunities to use this methodology to address social, civic, and commercial needs.”
Highlighting a recent design thinking success, the design team ÞYKJÓ will present its project Börnin að borðinu (Children at the Table), which focuses on children's culture design and service design in urban planning. The project won the Icelandic Design Award 2024. ÞYKJÓ creates a whimsical world of installations, costumes, and toys for children.
Following the presentations, Anna Hildur Hildibrandsdóttir will moderate an open discussion.
The event will take place at CCP’s headquarters in Gróska, Bjargargata 1, third floor. CCP will provide a light breakfast. The event will be held in English, with live-streamed presentations.
Seating is limited. Register for on-site attendance here: https://forms.gle/zazHnv1EibCibXLB7
- hendrix@invisiblenotes.com
Launching Entrepreneurship Micro-credentials at Bifröst University
Reykjavík - 24 March 2025:
Starting in autumn 2025, R. Michael Hendrix will teach in a new Entrepreneurship Micro-credential program at Bifröst University. Developed with the Breiðholt Service Center and supported by a university collaboration under the Iceland Ministry of Higher Education, the program builds on his design thinking curriculum. It expands to include entrepreneurial theory and practical applications in Iceland, taught alongside Arnar Sigurðsson and Fida Abu Libdeh.
Video still from “Entrepreneurship Micro-credential at Háskólinn á Bifröst”
This 18-ECTS university-level program is open to anyone interested in Iceland’s startup and innovation community. Taught in English, it improves access to higher education, especially for those who do not speak Icelandic as their first language. Although 90% of course materials at Icelandic universities are in English, people of foreign origin enroll at lower rates. This program helps close that gap and promotes diversity in higher education.
Students will learn through theory, hands-on exercises, and case studies. They will develop entrepreneurial skills, understand the business environment, and explore how to start and sustain a company. To apply, visit Bifröst University’s website.
- hendrix@invisiblenotes.com
Reykjavík Grapevine Features Two Beats Ahead LIVE! Podcast
Reykjavík - 20 March 2025:
The March issue of Reykjavík Grapevine, Iceland’s leading culture newspaper, features Two Beats Ahead LIVE!, a podcast by R. Michael Hendrix. In this series, Hendrix interviews Reykjavík-based musicians, , including Klemens Hannigan of HATARI in episode seven, to explore their creative ventures beyond music. Hosted at his Huldunótur workspace, these live, public sessions foster artistic collaboration and celebrate Reykjavík’s diverse creative community.
Writer Ish Sveinsson Houle delves into the podcast’s origins and Hendrix’s mission to expand on ideas from Two Beats Ahead, his book co-authored with Panos A. Panay, President of the Recording Academy.
Klemens Hannigan with R. Michael Hendrix at Huldunótur on February 20, 2025
Previous episodes of the podcast include Valgeir Sigurðsson on Complementary Differences, Melkorka Magnúsdóttir on Innovation as Optimism and Íris Thorarins on Balancing Creativity and Strategy. Check out all the episodes online and read the full story about the podcast on the Grapevine’s website, here.
- hendrix@invisiblenotes.com