FRUM (Jenný Kragesteen) is a Faroe Islander who was last heard of living in Iceland. She’s visited these pages on several occasions, always with a song carrying a single word title like this one and the last time was in August 2022 with the single ‘Run’, subsequent a track on the album ‘For The Blue Sky’.
She returns to share a new single, ‘Rise’, which is a song about new beginnings, so it is eminently suitable to a release now, in the opening days of the New Year.
There is almost a life coach intensity about her message to a friend who has lost their way, namely “I want to encourage you to rise, try, fail, try again and remember that you only live once.” Her philosophy is that we all have the strength within us to rise again, irrespective of the challenge and the odds not being in our favour.
You can always be sure that anything coming out of a Faroese artist, irrespective of whether they still live there, will be challenging, experimental and expressive and ‘Rise’ ticks all those boxes.
It isn’t so much a request to the friend to tackle the adversity as a command, and one made with authority. The song contains all the FRUM traits we’ve identified in the past, with plenty going on from start to finish, sudden changes of pace and volume, odd rhythms, unexpected instrumentation, the various recorded noises she drops into the song randomly, wails that seem to echo across the vastness of the mountains and bays of both her homeland and her adopted one and a bewitching voice that is soaked in local folklore.
And this one is replete with a mesmerising electro-percussive storm to finish it off. I don’t know what that has to do with building up a friend’s confidence to fight on – I expected something a little gentler – but I don’t care because it is mightily impressive in its own right.
In fact there are clear similarities in the construction of the song with yesterday’s feature, the Brazilian singer and dancer Alexia Evellyn’s ‘Savage Daughters’. It makes me wonder what they would sound like in collaboration, a lady from the Amazon jungle and one from the windswept steep cliffs and narrow fjords of a tiny country with Viking heritage.
She’s well known for her videos and often produces them herself. Since there is one for ‘Rise’ I’ll offer it to you rather than the Spotify track but I have to hand it to her, this one has me baffled! (Pardon the pun).
Find her on:
Website: https://frummusic.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/frumverse
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/frumversee/
