Kira Kira, Kristín Björk Kristjánsdóttir, is a founding member of Icelandic art collective Kitchen Motors. For the past 10 years she has tinkered with noises in bands such as Spúnk, Big band brútal, Stórsveit Sigríðar Níelsdóttur and as Kira Kira since autumn 1999 when she had a funny nightmare in Tokyo. She has composed music for theatre, dance and movies and performed \ exhibited extensively in her home country, Iceland as well as around Europe.
Kristin's visual work is often a staged haunting of some sort created with sound, smoke, wind and light presented in installations or on film: Singing black holes, blood driven cowboy hats hovering in thin air, a duel between smoke machines in castle towers, beset tape recorders, eternal explosions, trembling doors and someone who's dead by laughter or romance.
She doesn't have many instruments, only a few music boxes attached to a pink wooden stick and a nylon string guitar her mom gave her when she was 12. So she sneaks around with a pocket recorder collecting sounds to toy with. Friends' garages tend to be full of noisemaking apparats and there's never a town without a forgotten piano. Then she turns her found sounds or the melodies she's played on any old forgotten thing she came across into songs on her laptop.
The relationship between adventurous music and primitive moving arts is of particular interest to Kira Kira. She creates performances where physical visuals such as remote controlled ghosts and blood driven cowboy hats floating in thin air with a bullet hole through the middle are set in context with electronic music, sometimes blending in theatrical elements, her home made 16 mm film or anything that serves the mood for each show. She either plays solo, singing and toying with small acoustic events inside electronic landscapes or with a band that usually consists of random friends whispered on board for each show.