Tonight, Thursday 6 August, Oktaves’ 8th Session Vol. 05: Pride Edition takes place at Smekkleysa (Hverfisgata 32, Reykjavík), celebrating queer musicians.
Behind the event is founder Yara Polana, whose work extends far beyond the stage. Through Oktaves, she has created one of Reykjavík’s most welcoming spaces for queer musicians while helping reshape how independent artists are supported in Iceland.
Some people build companies. Others build communities. Yara Polana has spent her life doing both. From launching an underground label in Mozambique to building Oktaves, an ambitious platform for independent musicians in Iceland, she has made a career out of creating opportunities where none existed. Through Oktaves and its live series, 8th Session, she’s showing that supporting artists isn’t just about putting musicians on stage, it’s about building the infrastructure that lets them grow, connect and keep creating. In the process, she has also helped shape one of Reykjavík’s most welcoming spaces for queer artists, almost by accident.
The earliest memory I have of Yara on a Reykjavík stage is at REC Arts, guitar in hand, perhaps singing too. So we start there, looking back at those first movements into music. Why was the guitar the instrument that pulled her in?
“The guitar has been a fascination for me as far back as I can recall,” says Yara. “My father kept an acoustic at our house, though it was strictly off limits to me. When I was ten, my cousin borrowed it and it ended up broken. My father decided piano was the better path and essentially tricked me into music school. I arrived expecting my first guitar lesson, only to find myself in a room with a grand piano. The disappointment was absolute.”
My father decided piano was the better path and essentially tricked me into music school. I arrived expecting my first guitar lesson, only to find myself in a room with a grand piano.
She didn’t walk away, just changed strategy. For the next four years, she set aside lunch money, coin by coin, until she turned fourteen. With those savings she bought her first instrument, a damaged secondhand acoustic, and began the long process of teaching herself to play.
It’s the same shape as everything built since: someone says no, and the answer is to find a side door.
A made-up genre, and a pattern that stuck
At eighteen, Yara started a label in Mozambique, MONA Records, for punk, rock and metal acts nobody else wanted. The label gave things away for free: recording, festivals, tours, videos. To get attention for a label nobody had heard of, they created a band with the same name as the record called MONA and invented a genre, mixing Marrabenta, Mozambican traditional music, with punk. They called it Rockabenta. MONA got a nomination from the Mozambican Music Awards.
“That’s been the pattern ever since,” she says. “Build something people actually want to look at, then point the attention at the artists behind it.”
When she moved to Europe in 2011, she saw on a bigger scale the exact same issue for all genres, the industry being secluded for a lot of talented people. Same problem, bigger scale. So she decided to recreate the same ideology and allow people at any stage of their career to get an “Oktave Higher™”, except this time the free services couldn’t be her and a camera and a weekend, they had to be built as a system, otherwise it only ever helps the twenty artists she could personally fit into a year.
Not a shop
Yara doesn’t mind the comparison to Bandcamp and other music platform services, she just thinks it answers a different question.
“They are all good products, but mostly behave like it’s a shop, and a shop assumes people are already walking past it,” she says. “Most independent musicians have a release, a gig in three weeks, no budget, and nothing connecting those two things.”
Oktaves is built around the release and the live show rather than the stream, which means distribution, merch, tickets, footage, earnings, in one dashboard instead of eight logins and a spreadsheet. “Selling your music is a transaction, that’s fine. Building a career is having the infrastructure to do it again next month, without starting from zero every time.”
I wouldn’t say we designed 8th Session as a queer space. We built a space where nobody has to explain themselves before they play, and queer artists found it first.
The project is funded by Rannís, Iceland’s research fund, something Yara points to on purpose. “It’s being built with public support for musicians, rather than money that expects to be paid back out of their royalty earnings later.” Musicians are involved at every stage, telling the team what’s broken before it ships. “That’s the part I care about most. This is being made with the people it’s for.”
From a podcast nobody asked for, to a night everybody remembers
Oktaves started as a podcast, built to carry musicians nobody wanted to give airtime to. Then well-known names showed up to support it, Pussy Riot, Ólöf Arnalds, Svavar Knútur, and something shifted.
“The people who couldn’t get a phone call returned were sitting in the same series, answering the same questions as artists everyone in this country knows,” she says. “It flattened the hierarchy a little. The problem was never talent. It was access.”
The live version, 8th Session, came from a simple observation: musicians play a great show for eighty people, and the next day it’s gone. So 8th Session folded everything the old label used to give away, video, sound, photos, a plan for the footage, into one night. “The musician comes in to play a gig and leaves with a body of work.”
The backlash is loudest online, but the room is still the room. When people are standing in front of a stage together, it’s very hard to sell them the idea that the person singing is a threat to them.
Vol. 04, at Smekkleysa, was the first full-house night since the series launched. “The first three sessions helped us understand the format,” says Yara, “but Vol. 04 felt closer to the larger vision. Less like us putting on a session somewhere, more like the session finally having a place that matches it.”
A queer night nobody designed
Earlier editions were held at Bar 22, one of Reykjavík’s oldest queer-frequented venues. Yara says it wasn’t a statement.
“Our crew is heavy in the queer scene, and we always had a queer musician join our session,” she says. Bar 22 wasn’t chosen for its history. “It was one of the few places that would let you try something unproven on a weeknight. The crowd already in that room became the crowd we built with.”
That accident is becoming intentional: Vol. 05, on August 6th, is a full Reykjavík Pride edition, with Glóþór, AfterpartyAngel, Daphne Always and Holy Hrafn. “I wouldn’t say we designed 8th Session as a queer space. We built a space where nobody has to explain themselves before they play, and queer artists found it first. Now we’re not going to pretend it happened on purpose. But we’re going to protect it on purpose.”
I want Oktaves to become the platform I needed when I was starting out. A place where independent musicians can access strategy, tools and real opportunities without already having money, connections or an industry team behind them.
On the current backlash queer communities are facing, Yara doesn’t overstate what a stage can do. “The backlash is loudest online, but the room is still the room. When people are standing in front of a stage together, it’s very hard to sell them the idea that the person singing is a threat to them.”
She’s blunt about the limits, too. “Visibility without infrastructure is just exposure, and exposure doesn’t protect anybody.” What she can offer is smaller: distribution, footage, a working payment link, a stage. “Keep booking them. Keep filming them. Keep giving them a place to express their voice.”
Leading without cutting anything off
Yara has spent her career in two industries, tech and music, that historically asked women to lead by imitating the men already in the room. She never felt she had to leave her femininity, or her queerness, at the door.
What holds Oktaves and 8th Session together, she says, is care that never shows up in a pitch deck: checking in with an artist two weeks before a show, remembering someone doesn’t drink, making sure the camera operator has eaten before doors open.
“What people call feminine energy is mostly that: listening before deciding, building slowly, letting the community set the pace instead of forcing the growth curve,” she says. “Tech and music both reward the opposite, and both are full of companies that scale fast and have nobody left who trusts them. For me it’s the actual method. It’s the only reason a small operation like ours can compete with people who have money we don’t have.”
Where it goes next
After the Pride edition, 8th Session leaves Reykjavík for the first time, with a session in Akureyri on August 26th, musicians from Sweden, and America coming for the next sessions. “The goal has never been to keep this inside one venue or one city,” Yara says. “We’re building a format that can travel, document different music communities, and eventually bring the whole infrastructure to other countries.”
Artists interested in Oktaves or a future 8th Session can reach the team through its social channels.
I want to return fully to creating and performing, while continuing to build things for other artists. I’ve never seen those two paths as separate.
Asked where she wants to be in a few years, Yara doesn’t separate the platform from the person building it. “I want Oktaves to become the platform I needed when I was starting out. A place where independent musicians can access strategy, tools and real opportunities without already having money, connections or an industry team behind them.”
And herself, as a musician. “I want to return fully to creating and performing, while continuing to build things for other artists. I’ve never seen those two paths as separate.”
A few years from now, she wants both to exist at a much higher level. It’s the whole idea behind the name. An Oktave higher.
8th Session Vol. 05: Pride Edition takes place tonight, Thursday, August 6 at 7pm at Smekkleysa (Hverfisgata 32, Reykjavík). Hosted by Oktaves, the monthly series celebrates Iceland’s independent music scene, with this edition spotlighting queer artists as part of Pride. The lineup features Glóþór, AfterpartyAngel, Daphne Always, and Holy Hrafn. Doors open at 19:00, the first performance starts at 19:30. Entry is pay what you can (minimum 1,500 ISK). Artists interested in performing at future sessions can contact Oktaves via DM.
The event on Facebook
The event on Instagram
Monre on Oktaves here.