The Faroe Islands’ G! Festival: a Mini Mardi Gras in a Place You’ve Probably Never Heard of…
Jem Aswad Executive Editor, Music The Faroe Islands seem a very unlikely place to hold a music festival. A string of rocky islands located in the North Atlantic between Scotland, Norway and Iceland, it has a population of around 56,000 people and, as any tour guide will tell you, approximately three times as many sheep. The weather and the terrain are wild and unpredictable — last week, as the Northern Hemisphere roasted, it ranged from clear and sunny to cold with driving rain, with temperatures between 50 and 65 degrees Fahrenheit. The country has a strong music tradition but just a handful of venues and one record label — Tutl (“total”), which, true to its name, releases local music in basically every genre, from classical to hip-hop to death metal, and whose office also holds the Faroes’ one surviving record store.