- Cloud Valley Music website -
- Andrew Cronshaw website -
- Andrew Cronshaw Facebook -

- Back to Reviews Introduction page -

Written in fRoots issue 360, June 2013


FUNI
Flúr
Green Man GMCD007 (2013)

Iceland has made a strong image for its pop and rock music, with Björk, Sigur Rós and others and Reykjavik’s Airwaves festival, and for its visual art and dramatic volcanic landscape, and the Icelandic epic sagas are well known as literature. But very few Icelanders sing its traditional songs, even though many are archived in the Árni Magnússon Institute.
     A leader among the exceptions is Bára Grímsdóttir, who has been singing and arranging the old rímur ballads and other folk songs since she heard them on her family’s farm as a child. A decade or so ago she met, and subsequently married, English folk musician Chris Foster. Since then the pair, as Funi, living in Reykjavik, have not only been researching and working with the songs, which are traditionally unaccompanied, but to accompany them they’ve brought back into use the old Icelandic instruments: the fretted dulcimer langspil and strange two-stringed fiðla. There’s very little evidence of the playing styles of these instruments, save that both were bowed, so they’ve had to deduce their own.
     This, the second Funi album, doesn’t feature fiðla, but Chris’s guitar, langspil and newly-acquired hammered dulcimer and Bára’s kantele provide a delicate ringing-stringed environment for most of the songs, while some Bára sings unaccompanied. Chris is now deeply immersed in Icelandic music and as well as having developed new approaches to his already modal guitar style to fit these modal songs he joins her on vocals, in Icelandic, for some tracks. Guests occasionally contribute vocals, double bass, clarinet or sax.
     The lyrics are mostly from named 19th and 20th-century writers or poets. As Rósa Thorsteinsdóttir of the Árni Magnússon Institute points out in her introduction to the booklet notes, rímur lyrics and the kvæðalög melodies weren’t firmly attached to one another; it was normal for singers to use or modify whichever tune appealed to them at the time. (Rósa herself has been a tireless worker on this material and advocate of making it available and used, and she was key in the release of the archive compilation CD Raddir – Voices and Steindór Andersen’s Rímur album).
     Funi’s melodies are mostly traditional, or occasionally new-composed as in the closer, a 17th-century hymn text set by Bára in the voice-switching, ‘medieval’-sounding parallel fifths of tvisöngur style.
     Not only is the music on Flúr attractive, melodious and varied, Funi are pioneers in bringing Iceland’s neglected song tradition appealingly into the light of the 21st century, where hopefully some of Iceland’s many young musicians will pick up on its possibilities as they have so distinctively in pop and rock.
     (Incidentally, the late and much-missed producer Hector Zazou told me when was making his big Songs From The Cold Seas multi-artist CD project in the mid-1990s that he was having trouble finding anything in Iceland that could be regarded as traditional music, until he went for tea with Björk’s auntie, and so came across the song Björk sang for the album).

www.funi-iceland.com


© 2013 Andrew Cronshaw
 

You're welcome to quote from reviews on this site, but please credit the writer and fRoots.

Links:
fRoots - The feature and review-packed UK-based monthly world roots music magazine in which these reviews were published, and by whose permission they're reproduced here.

It's not practical to give, and keep up to date, current contact details and sales sources for all the artists and labels in these reviews, but try Googling for them, and where possible buy direct from the artists.
CDRoots.com in the USA, run by Cliff Furnald, is a reliable and independent online retail source, with reviews, of many of the CDs in these reviews; it's connected to his excellent online magazine Rootsworld.com 

For more reviews click on the regions below

NORDIC        BALTIC        IBERIA (& islands)   

CENTRAL & EASTERN EUROPE, & CAUCASUS   

OTHER EUROPEAN        AMERICAS        OTHER, AND WORLD IN GENERAL

- Back to Reviews Introduction page -