Drevo – 'Pieśni z Ukrainy’ (Songs from Ukraine) (KOKA, 1998)
Folk culture in the Soviet Union was state-appropriated and it were the soviet states that promoted official song and dance groups, with impressive entourage, but frequently out of any real touch with the music actually performed in the countryside. The group that initiated performing traditional music in crudo was the ensemble Drevo, founded in 1979 by Yevhen Yefremov, today a professor at the National Music Academy of Ukraine, and a renowned ethnomusicologist.
Since then, the group has been co–created by many artists who have had a significant impact on the development of Ukrainian musical culture, including Serhiy Okhrimchuk (a violinist performing, among others, in the Kossack Chorea, collaborating with many jazz bands or the famous rock band Okean Elzy), Nataliya Serbina (ethnomusicologist, singer, lyricist), Tetiana Sopilka (she collaborated with, among others, Wojciech Waglewski, in Warsaw she founded a band named Dziczka, and is the author of music for theatrical performances) or Alla Zahaykewych (an outstanding composer of electroacoustic music). The activity of Drevo was an important point of reference for Polish artists reaching for the rural repertoire.
Ahh, in the field a tree tall and lean
On its branches leaves are wide and green.
From that tree a black crow’s screech
And a young girl for her Cossack weeps
('Oj, na polu drzewo (Ah, in the field a tree)' – lyrical cossack song)
The songs on the album released by Koka come from the Polesia and Poltava Region (Left–bank Ukraine). As Włodzimierz Nakonieczny writes in his introduction to the album, the songs presented there can be divided into two segments: calendar songs (spring, harvest) as well as lyrical songs and ballads. Depending on the place the song comes from, one will hear different dialects of the Ukrainian language, and in each of them, the elements characteristic of Ukrainian music: narrow tonal range, raw textures, vyhuky (cries ending stanzas), broken words, repetitions, ornaments, long chants, influence of choral music. Songs from the Poltava region often have a wider scale, they are distinguished by their polyphonic sound, in which, apart from the bass sung by the entire group, we also hear two solo voices – high and middle.
(Filip Lech)
Svitlana Nianio – 'Kytytsi' (KOKA, 1999)
In the title essay from the collection 'Planet Wormwood', Oksana Zabhuzko proves that 'the idea of a living planet as one ecosystem, a kind of rational organism' organically stems from the centuries–old Ukrainian intellectual tradition: from Grigory Skovoroda to the 'green gospel' by Bohdan–Ihor Antonych and Orchestra of the Cosmos by Pavlo Tychyna. I consider it not an overstatement to say that in contemporary music the most original heir of these traditions is Svitlana Nianio.
On her first solo album, the artist formerly known from the band Cukor Bila Smert', creates surreal, somewhat dark fairy tales, set where the human world intersects with the world of nature: in quiet hamlets, on the edge of the woods, 'in a crown of transparent clouds'. Her visions are populated by birds of prey or snakes, as if taken from ancient myths, and the dead walk the earth amongst the living.
The artist herself, when asked in an interview for the Attic magazine about the themes appearing in her works, replied:
What interests me is some mystery of the world. I am inspired by what can only be seen from the corner of the eye. Or not even what we see, but what we feel, and then can’t put our finger on what it was exactly.
One can think of a multitude of musical associations (such as even Meredith Monk and New York minimalism, Iva Bittová, Księżyc, Catherine Jauniaux, and even baroque–inspired works of Nico or Moondog), but the whole thing remains as elusive as the mystery of the world. This is one of the most beautiful recordings I have heard, not only in reference to Ukraine or Central-Eastern Europe, but to the entire late 20th century music from the whole world.
(Patryk Zakrzewski)