This episode is a powerful conversation about queer creativity, artistic identity, visual world-building, sobriety, music marketing, and why independent musicians sometimes have to stop perfecting their ideas and simply make them real.

Mighty Bear is an Icelandic queer artist project built around complete creative freedom, combining experimental electronic music, abstract pop, neoclassical influences, visual storytelling, drag, fashion, masks, and the emotional weight of a long background in post-metal. In this episode of the Oktaves Podcast – Talks with Musicians, Mighty Bear explains how the project became a space to create without the compromises that come with bands, genres, expectations, or other people’s ideas of what an artist should be.The conversation traces Mighty Bear’s visual evolution from the Icelandic drag scene into increasingly elaborate costumes and masks. What originally began as a practical solution to performing live without spending hours on drag makeup gradually became part of the project’s artistic identity. Mighty Bear also reflects on watching masked artists such as Sleep Token become prominent years later, and why seeing similar ideas enter mainstream music has created pressure to evolve the visual language again rather than stay comfortable with one look.Musically, Mighty Bear describes the project as somewhere between abstract pop, experimental electronic music, neoclassical composition, ambient textures, and the emotional heaviness of metal. After almost two decades of experience in bands and the Icelandic music scene, the project became a way to bring music, fashion, visual art, promotion, and performance together inside one creative universe.The episode also explores one of the biggest contradictions facing independent musicians today: how do you market deeply personal art without turning yourself into a commercial content product? Mighty Bear has years of experience helping other bands promote themselves, yet still struggles with the pressure to constantly create TikToks and social content simply to remain visible. The conversation gets into music marketing, artist branding, grant applications, creative bureaucracy, and the validation of receiving funding to complete new music.There is also a deeply personal side to the conversation. Mighty Bear reflects on almost four years of sobriety and a song written about going too far, damaging relationships, vulnerability, and accepting an intense personality rather than hiding it. The episode also explores remix collaborations, growing up as a queer outsider finding refuge in punk, hardcore, and metal shows, and the desire to now give younger artists that same feeling of belonging.

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Welcome to the Oktaves podcast🎙️ Talks with musicians! Where we uplift local musicians voices.

This podcast is about chatting about and sharing with each other tips and tricks on how to succeed in the music industry as an independent musician, with an emphasis on branding and marketing, and overall management, whether your goal is to stay forever independent or get label-ready. We are very passionate about breaking the cycle of gatekeeping in the industry, so we strive towards bringing you conversations where these layers of the onion will be peeled one by one.

We are also here to uplift and shed light on independent (or previously independent) musicians in our community, who are so kind to share their struggles, their wins, successes, their strategies, and advice or some secrets possibly to how they got there.

🔗 Follow Oktaves:

https://instagram.com/withoktaves

https://facebook.com/oktaves

https://tiktok.com/@withoktaves

In today's episode, performance artist MRI, also known as the Purple Werewolf, explains how a chance meeting with Pussy Riot's Diana Burkot turned into POPERA, a mixed genre pop opera he built without any formal music training.He walks through the meeting itself, what it was like to learn who he was actually collaborating with, and how the entire Purple Werewolf mythology, right down to the costume, arrived almost fully formed once the two of them started writing songs together.The story inside POPERA follows a werewolf who teaches Virginia Woolf to grow wings so she can fly out of a marriage, loses his memory to beings encountered deep in space, and searches the universe for a father who turns out to be a giant made of light. MRI traces that fairy tale directly back to his own life, from a childhood spent as a competitive gymnast and disco dancer in working class Denmark to years of durational performance training under artists like Marina Abramović, all without a single formal music lesson.Since 2011, MRI has also built a parallel body of work portraying his parents. A project called Rule Pink, performed alongside his mother across the 37 cities she has lived, became the documentary film My Mother's Pink. He is now developing a companion project about his father, who is from Niger and Fulani, and explains how that search shows up inside POPERA too.We also get into the object at the center of POPERA's opening number: a trench coat with 200 cassette tapes sewn inside it, holding a full album that nobody can hear unless the coat itself is destroyed. MRI explains what that piece says about ownership and access in the streaming era, and why he believes live performance is about to matter more, not less, as AI reshapes how music gets made.If you are trying to find your own voice inside a system that rewards speed and constant output, this conversation is for you. MRI's case for a private, unglamorous practice before anything reaches an audience is a useful counterweight to the pressure to share everything, right away.

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Welcome to the Oktaves podcast🎙️ Talks with musicians! Where we uplift local musicians voices.

This podcast is about chatting about and sharing with each other tips and tricks on how to succeed in the music industry as an independent musician, with an emphasis on branding and marketing, and overall management, whether your goal is to stay forever independent or get label-ready. We are very passionate about breaking the cycle of gatekeeping in the industry, so we strive towards bringing you conversations where these layers of the onion will be peeled one by one.

We are also here to uplift and shed light on independent (or previously independent) musicians in our community, who are so kind to share their struggles, their wins, successes, their strategies, and advice or some secrets possibly to how they got there.

🔗 Follow Oktaves:

https://instagram.com/withoktaves

https://facebook.com/oktaves

https://tiktok.com/@withoktaves

Icelandic traditional music was on the verge of disappearing, and now a new generation is bringing it back.In this episode of the Oktaves Podcast, Jakob Fjólar and Sindri Gunnsteinsson share how they are reviving Icelandic folk traditions and two-voice singing techniques that were almost lost over time. What once faded due to cultural shifts and social pressure is now being rediscovered, practiced, and shared again through a modern lens.Both Jakob and Sindri grew up deeply connected to folk music through family and community. From early exposure to festivals, church singing, and traditional gatherings, music was never something separate from life — it was embedded in it. That foundation shaped how they approach music today: not as a trend, but as something living and inherited.They break down how Icelandic traditional singing works, including the unique two-voice harmonization where singers shift roles dynamically, creating movement within the melody itself. Unlike most modern music systems, these traditions were never formally written down. They were passed from person to person, making them powerful, but also fragile.At one point, this music nearly disappeared entirely, with only a few people continuing the practice.What makes this story powerful is what’s happening now. Instead of staying locked in history, Jakob Fjólar and Sindri Gunnsteinsson are part of a new wave bringing this sound into modern contexts, through TikTok, international audiences, and new interpretations of cultural heritage.They also touch on an unexpected dynamic: how foreign audiences often show more interest in Icelandic traditional music than locals, creating a shift in how this culture is valued and preserved.This episode is both a cultural deep dive and a strategic insight for artists: how to take something ancient, meaningful, and nearly lost — and make it relevant again.This episode is about preservation, identity, and the power of music to outlive generations.

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Welcome to the Oktaves podcast🎙️ Talks with musicians! Where we uplift local musicians voices.

This podcast is about chatting about and sharing with each other tips and tricks on how to succeed in the music industry as an independent musician, with an emphasis on branding and marketing, and overall management, whether your goal is to stay forever independent or get label-ready. We are very passionate about breaking the cycle of gatekeeping in the industry, so we strive towards bringing you conversations where these layers of the onion will be peeled one by one.

We are also here to uplift and shed light on independent (or previously independent) musicians in our community, who are so kind to share their struggles, their wins, successes, their strategies, and advice or some secrets possibly to how they got there.

🔗 Follow Oktaves:

https://instagram.com/withoktaves

https://facebook.com/oktaves

https://tiktok.com/@withoktaves