‘Śpiewy Polesia. Ukraina’ (Singing from Polesia. Ukraine) (Music Founded, 2008)
A church stood on the hill, there a girl was married against her will
Say, mother, how in a captive marriage with an unloved one will I be?
You will have enough to drink and eat and the unloved one will be a good fit.
Oh, mother, you gave me away, trampled me like hemp into the dirt,
Just as hemp rots in the ground, so will my happiness in the world never be found.
– sings Katerina Repeta on a recording made by Andrzej and Małgorzata Bieńkowski in 2007 in Polesia, Rivnenski Oblast.
One cannot overestimate the contribution of Andrzej Bieńkowski – a painter and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw – to the archiving and popularization of Polish rural music. His ethnological activity began by accident, when he was looking for inspiration for his works, sketching in the countryside. He found out that a musician, Józef Kędzierski, lived in a nearby village. ‘I've never heard anything like it, it felt like discovering Atlantis,’ says Bieńkowski, who then started his very own private Action of Collecting Musical Folklore. Truth be told, unlike the original Action from the 1950s, not financed by anyone. In 2007, together with his wife Małgorzata, they founded a label that was tirelessly releasing field recordings from their vast archive (as well as studio albums of contemporary bands playing a rural repertoire – Tęgie Chłopy, Kompania Janusz Prusinowski, Kapela Niwiński or Kapela Brodów). Rural music in central Poland, where the painter's adventure with village sounds began, was dying. His search thus moved to the east, to the Lubelskie region, to Roztocze. In 2003, the Bieńkowski family reached Ukraine.
A short day and ghastly waiting on the corrupt borders. The night found us on some decrepit side road. Any attempt to speed above 40 km per hour would end with the bottom of the car banging against stones. Late at night we reach a dark, mysterious, already seemingly sleeping village. […] We say something about ourselves, what we do, why we came. Singers come, we drink one ‘glibna’, i.e. moonshine. Gradually, you can see that we are on the same wavelength, we become friends. The ladies themselves propose to sing. I am waiting with tension, I don’t know anything about the songs from Polesia.
This is how he remembers his first visit to Ukraine, where he and his wife returned many times later. In a few years they recorded 40 groups, several wedding bands and many singers (male and female, majority were the latter though). You can find almost everything in the 26 CD recordings. Ritual songs, Cossacks, folk beliefs (a recording of Polina Sydorenko's band related to the rite of walking the rusalkas out of the village – one of my favourite fragments of the album), the hardships of life and poverty (a song sung by Ivan Petrovets, starting with the words: ‘Son, son, my child, stop drinking vodka or you will drink your horse away’, perhaps the most poignant fragment of the album). The recordings are raw – we hear the sounds of the surroundings, grunts, and the singers’ small mistakes.
The album Śpiewy Polesia. Ukraina, like every publication of Music Founded, is accompanied by a several dozen pages long booklet containing travel notes, photos, and lyrics (the translations). It is also worth mentioning another foreign release by the Bieńkowski family – the equally delightful album Białoruś. Śpiewy obrzędowe. Śpiewy z kołchozów (Belarus. Ritual songs. Songs from kolkhozes).