Often, when i’ve written about music from the Faroe Islands, i’ve remarked on the fascinating way they make diverse genres blend and mingle. What often emerges is a unique kind of hybrid, comprising elements from prog rock, jazz, contemporary, experimental and electronic. But not always, and certainly not in the case of the electronica-infused Whirlpool, the new album from Faroese musician Jenný Augustudóttir Kragesteen, aka FRUM.
That title, Whirlpool, suggests swirling around, and not only is this idea of circularity picked up in the artwork – a female figure twisted round – but in the lyrics too. The first song, ‘Orbit With You’, invokes it in both its title and its sentiments, “They say that we are here again, back here again once more”. ‘Sun Aura’ speaks of how “the seasons go around” and stepping “into the circle to see the other side”, while the title track makes it the vehicle for emotional focus: “All of my heart centers round you from now”. The penultimate track is even named ‘Cycle’, relishing the prospect of a more collaborative journey, “I will ride the circle with you”.
This sense of something going round – cycling or oscillating – is a clear feature of the music too. ‘Sun Aura’ establishes the paradigm: relaxed, flowing verses arrive at the sonically complex line “Getting ready for your very first ride”, passing into the main refrain where beats immediately appear, driving the track on in a total contrast to the more spare, chugging restraint heard elsewhere. There are times throughout Whirlpool when FRUM brings to mind ionnalee’s work, though Kragesteen’s use of her voice is distinctively different, favouring low registers rather than letting rip at altitude. ‘Wave’ follows, even more polarised, with vocoded verses over a strange pulse that slowly materialises as beats that propel the low-key (and again, low register) chorus. There’s a pronounced sense of alternating states, either ruminating in a place of float, words hard to make out, or brought into sharper focus, moving at speed.
This curious relationship with pulse is something of a characteristic of the album as a whole. In ‘Ride’ the verses (with deliberately uncanny autotuned vocals) occupy a place where tempo seems irrelevant, snapping into a metric grid in the choruses. Here, though, one feels it’s a lack of beats that’s more fertile, with the final chorus jettisoning them and entering an elated reverie. That’s also true in ‘Whirlpool’, with verses laden with so much bliss they become dense, aligning with cheerful trip-hop beats from time to time, in another example of oscillating states.
Other tracks pursue other musical ends. ‘Choir’ taps into an Imogen Heap-like vocoder chorus to elicit rich chordal profusions and attain a level of bass-underpinned dreamy suspension. That’s a quality that permeates pretty much all the songs, initiated by the album’s opening track ‘Intro’, a brief in medias res plunge into a network of overlapping vocal strands, followed by ‘Orbit With You’, where slow, steady, measured verses are barely sung, more spoken or whispered. They’re answered not by something overtly driven but instead by a subtle gear shift, gently pushing on in tempo without recourse to anything remotely percussive, riding waves of bass.
The highlights of Whirlpool are the songs ‘Rise’ and ‘Cycle’. ‘Rise’ at first turns Kragesteen’s voice into weird, squiggly tendrils, placed above pounding beat repetitions (faint echoes of Björk here). Yet the verses immediately override and reduce the power and speed of those beats; until, that is, the choruses, when they surge forward as the foundation for huge, glorious bursts of euphoria. The beats are interesting here as they suggest a vague kind of triple pattern earlier on, but it slowly becomes clear that they’re syncopated, and that despite appearances this is a track with four beats in a bar. That’s finally made clear in the closing lines of the song, in a coda of absolute lyrical and metric focus.
‘Cycle’ is more emphatically pop-infused, though initially turning the earlier paradigm on its head, making the verses all about upbeat momentum while the first chorus moves away, returning to that euphoria. Thereafter the choruses become a synthesis of speed and ecstasy, leading to a sublime conclusion with a closing line, repeated at length, that again focuses on circularity: “Starts with the end and ends with the beginning”. Whereupon the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it ‘Intro’ is answered by a much more expansive ‘Outro’, which ‘Cycle’ dovetails into; another chorus of assorted drifting vocal strands, as if each of the preceding tracks was encapsulated within its shining, whirling eddies.
Released by the Faroes’ principal record label, Tutl, a couple of months ago, Whirlpool is available on digital. The lyrics (which are mostly correct), can be found on the Tutl website.
