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Written in Folk Roots issue 170/171, 1997

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Alfagurt Ljóðar Mín Tunga - Traditional Music In The Faroe Islands
Tutl SHD 16 (1995)
(and book, pub. Føroya Skúlabókagrunnur, ISBN 99918-0-043-3)

SPÆLIMENNINIR
Flóð Og Fjøra
Tutl SHD 18 (1996)

The ring-dancing singers’ footstamp in a tættir, a satirical song-form, opens this CD which, in conjunction with its companion book of transcriptions, descriptions and background, is an excellent and lucid introduction to the traditional forms of the tiny group of dramatically beautiful islands which forms a giant’s stepping-stone between Shetland and Iceland, politically a part of Denmark but largely self-governing and with a very distinct personality.
      Here are examples of the three main types of ring-dance song - the heroic ballad, the folk-ballad, and the tættir, sung, as everything on the album, without instrumental accompaniment. Not everything is or was danced: there are skjaldur (short song-rhymes sung by adults for children, and in a couple of cases here by the children), and fine, interesting church-songs, kingosálmur, in which the solo singing is melodically and rhythmically freer and more expressive than the strict-discipline religious vocalising that swamped so much of the rest of Europe, and that individualism is maintained in group singing (as it is in the Gaelic long psalms of Scotland) - track 6 is a particularly spine-tingling example. As elsewhere, organs and uniformity drove out much of this style. This whole record, of people making music for themselves, not as a product, is a window on another musical and social world.
      Though, as always, the old ways are changing, there is among the Faroes’ population of 43,000 a general cultural renaissance, including an upsurge in ring-dancing among at least a proportion of the young.
      A factor in that renaissance is the work of Kristian Blak’s Tutl label, the main, indeed just about the only, source not only of archive recordings but also of Faroese rock and pop, and also of piano and keyboard player Blak’s own music, including a suite based on hymn tunes and the atmospheric Addeq album which features a collaboration between Blak and Finnish-resident kora-player Malang Cissokho.

      Blak is also a fine, non-stodgy folk dance-band piano-driver and is a member of the islands’ leading folk band Spælimenninir, formed in 1974, whose six members have backgrounds in the Faroes, Sweden, Denmark and the USA, and two of whom, Faroese guitarist and mandolinist Ivar Bærentsen and Danish fiddler Erling Olsen, are also in the band Suleskær, whose CD was reviewed earlier in FR. The sources of the material on Flóð Og Fjøra (Ebb And Flow) naturally reflect those backgrounds, while the band itself - two fiddles, mandolin, guitar, recorder, piano and bass, in a smart and varied set of strong, hummable new-made and traditional dance tunes, plus several instrumental developments of Faroese skjaldur, one of a kingo hymn, and two songs, one Faroese and one from Jutland - has its own sound, an airy, zesty lift that twitches the feet for dancing, somewhere between Shetland, Norden, Scotland and Cape Breton in feel.


© 1997 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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