Photography by Árni Torfason

Forget partying like a rock star…get your ass to Iceland where rock stars go for lessons in serious excess at the Iceland Airwaves music festival. What began in an airplane hangar nine years ago as a poorly funded underground showcase event for local DJs has metamorphosed into one of the coolest international music festivals this side of the Arctic Circle. Each year, during the third week of October, bands and fans, DJs and dance crowds, press and promoters from across Europe, the US, and Canada, migrate en masse, like so many music-obsessed party puffins, to join their Icelandic counterparts in the city of Reykjavik, which hosts the hell-bent four-day extravaganza. With more than 140 bands and DJs expected to play at ten official show venues and fourteen or so unofficial ones, this year’s event guarantees nonstop all-night show hopping punctuated with the kind of compulsory communal substance abuse one would expect from any civilization that goes from the never-ending daylight of summer to the winter’s endless months of perpetual night, with only art, music, sex, and alcohol to stave off the madness. (Give up on sleep altogether and get over to a neighborhood bar to see how the locals do their best late-night hardcore gettin’ down.) The musical mayhem culminates with the Blue Lagoon after-party, wherein a caravan of buses hauls the festival’s survivors sixty miles out to the country’s most famous geothermal spa and deposits the delirious revelers in the silica-rich waters for a serious detox. You gotta’ love this country. What other music festival offers you the opportunity to rock yourself half to death and still return home spa-fresh with silky smooth skin?