“Ask where the music is taking you” | Frigg

A minimalist piano, sounding like a child’s musical box, is first joined by a single fiddle and then by the other musicians as the music swells into a joyous ensemble piece. This is ‘Return from Helsinki’, one of the highlights of Frigg’s 2005 album Keidas (Oasis). The track is quintessential Frigg; like so much of the Finnish band’s music, it is full of yearning and a sense of homecoming. Those touches of piano are provided by multi-instrumentalist Esko Järvelä, one of Frigg’s four fiddlers, the others being Tommi Asplund, Alina Järvelä and Tero Hyväluoma. And it’s the perfect way to celebrate over 20 years of this remarkable group. 

Any band that survives for over two decades is allowed to have occasional personnel changes and, since they formed in 2000, Frigg have, indeed, seen several line-up shifts. In the beginning they were a pan-Nordic outfit including two Norwegian fiddlers, brothers Gjermund and Einar Olav Larsen. Nowadays, it’s a purely Finnish affair – a septet comprising the four violinists plus mandolin, bagpipe and cittern player Petri Prauda, double bassist Juho Kivivuori and Topi Korhonen, who has recently replaced Anssi Salminen as the band’s guitarist.

I speak with Järvelä and Prauda via Zoom while they are busy organising tour dates. I begin by noting that, right from their first album, a bluegrass influence can be heard alongside the expected Finnish polska sound. Frigg’s music has often been described as Nordic bluegrass, or Nordgrass. “We like to listen to it and play it but also, here in Kaustinen, there’s a tradition of immigrants travelling to the US and some of them have come back and brought American music with them, so fiddlers who’ve been travelling back and forth have brought some American influences into the Kaustinen repertoire,” Järvelä says.

Frigg have strong links with Kaustinen – a place known as the heart of Finnish folk music and home to a long-running folk music festival. Prauda proudly tells me that, in December 2021, UNESCO inscribed the Kaustinen fiddle-playing tradition into their Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity list. This means Kaustinen fiddle-playing is now in the august company of Indonesia’s gamelan and Bulgaria’s multi-part singing tradition – a cause for great celebration. As Järvelä puts it: “We had an extra Christmas before Christmas!” 

So, rejoicing in this global recognition of the Kaustinen tradition, it’s only right that Frigg should be touring the world again in 2022 for belated 20th anniversary celebrations. Their tour will take them to Scotland, Germany, Poland, the US and Canada. It all sounds exhausting and, after two decades and ten albums, lesser bands might have run out of energy and ideas – but Frigg seem irrepressible. They’ve just agreed on a three-year plan to record three new albums, the first of these made up entirely of traditional tunes. “It’s like a return to our roots,” Järvelä explains. “We thought it would be interesting to do a down-to-earth, rootsy album.” 

The bluegrass influence in their music means that Frigg can create driving rhythms without the need for a drummer. Prauda explains that “using double bass, guitar and mandolin is a very effective concept of a rhythm section in an acoustic folk band context. The rhythm section is very tight, and you can use the roles of the different instruments in the accompaniment section, so it’s a nice concept which we got from American folk music.” 

Frigg live in 2017 © Krista Kallio

Prauda is being a little modest in describing himself as part of the rhythm section. On ‘Early Bird’, from the 2020 album FriXX (a nod to their 20th anniversary), it’s Prauda’s cittern and the guitar that establish the erratic urgency of this ‘unsquare’ dance. The fiddlers then join to provide a miniature orchestral accompaniment before a delightful cittern and guitar interlude. Then the whole glorious thing races towards its conclusion, sounding like a distant, wayward cousin of an Aaron Copland hoedown.

Alongside the pervasive echo of bluegrass, Järvelä identifies Swedish folk band Väsen as a big influence, as well as Kaustinen’s own JPP, who have been performing since the early 1980s. In fact, there’s a strong family connection between the two bands – Järvelä’s father and cousins are members of JPP so, understandably, he says, “some of the JPP sound is in Frigg.”

Järvelä agrees that while, at the beginning, they simply wanted to make powerful, energetic music, they have become increasingly interested in arrangements. “The last three albums have shown noticeable steps up in arranging, finding new levels, building more dramatic curves in the tunes.” 

Prauda feels Frigg’s influences are wide-ranging. “Everything we hear and like naturally seeps into our music-making. We mostly play original music – our own compositions – so classical, rock, Nordic folk, Celtic music – all these influences just seep in.” This makes perfect sense when you listen to Frigg’s music, which seems to borrow from so many different styles and, even within the space of a single piece, can often wander off in unexpected melodic and rhythmic directions. 

It is obvious to listeners that here is a group of musicians who aren’t simply performing a set of tunes but who are setting off on a series of musical adventures, taking the listener on a journey with them. I am not surprised to find this is something to which they’ve given a great deal of thought. “We’ve done a lot of work thinking about the direction in which the expressive arc of a piece is going, or the direction in which its energy is flowing,” reflects Prauda. “It brings a special ‘storytelling’ to abstract instrumental music. The listener is free to listen to it how they like, but you can follow it like a journey and ask where the music is taking you.”

Apart from an increasing emphasis on sophisticated arrangements, Frigg aren’t planning any radical changes. They have never forced themselves into new musical directions just for the sake of it. “The evolution,” says Järvelä, “has always been natural, taking new directions a little bit at a time, but still the basic Frigg sound is there and can be clearly heard.” Prauda agrees: “Somehow the musical concept of Frigg, the sound – how to use the four fiddles and the accompaniment section – has been very clear right from the start. We’ve developed it along the way, new influences come in, but the basic sound and concept has been there right from the beginning. All these 20 years we’ve just gone deeper into this one thing.” Perhaps that’s the secret of the band’s success and longevity, as they take listeners with them on a musical trip full of dramatic curves, going ever deeper into that delightful, uplifting Frigg sound. 

But one question remains. The goddess Frigg, in Norse mythology, is the wife of Odin and her legacy carries into the current day; the English word ‘Friday’ means ‘Frigg’s Day.’ I wonder why they had chosen to name themselves after this deity. “Frigg is the goddess of love and wisdom – which isn’t a bad thing as an image,” explains Prauda. Järvelä offers a more prosaic reason: “The name was picked by chance from a dictionary; we didn’t think about it too much,” he admits, before Prauda adds, “but it’s nice that, every week, there’s a Frigg day!”   

This feature originally appeared in the May 2022 edition of Songlines magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe today​