The Faroe Islands’ G! Festival: a Mini Mardi Gras in a Place You’ve Probably Never Heard of…
variety.comJem 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.
The country has a thriving music scene that has been showcased nearly every year for the past two decades at the G! Festival, which counterintuitively is held on and near the beach in a small village called Syðrugøta (“SID-ru-GO-tah”), drawing around 5,000 people each year to a place with a population of about 500, no hotel and few stores.
Read more on variety.com