Cooling Off Scorching August Days with the Magical Musical Breeze of Moonlight Sky (2011)

Arhiv Arhiv Last updated 11 June 2026

Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik

Location: Gornji trg (old town center) / Ljubljana / Slovenia
Concert date: 08/25/2011
Attendance: 150
Ticket price: €0.00 (free entry!)

How do you spice up a Friday night? With a leisurely stroll through old Ljubljana. After hellish heat at the end of August. Those two don’t really go together. The words hellish and leisurely, of course. But the whole bag of improvised little concert stages decorating old Ljubljana these days throws a bigger challenge your way. Not even the radiating shockwave of heat, which you still feel at nine in the evening spreading off the urban walls, cobblestones, concrete and asphalt of the old town center, can chase you off. Let alone the unbearable stink wafting up through the flushing of Ljubljana’s decrepit sewers, last renovated in the mid-18th century. A person can survive absolutely anything (willingly or not).

And so it happened that we ended up, totally by chance, at the entrance of St. James’s Parish on Gornji trg, where Moonlight Sky were playing on a small stage. The band is one of the more interesting additions to the Slovenian music scene, a real-deal musical phenomenon in fact, one you can’t just sip a cup of tea to if you want to catch them live.

The trio of Janez Moder (bass guitar), Miha Petric (guitar) and Neisha’s buddy Žiga Kožar (drums) in acoustic garb. Three sets, two breaks, in front of a good 100 heads or so. A superb evening of tasting and cooling down for the ears. There’s nothing better than the company of Moonlight Sky. Field-tested. A totally unique musical foldout, the culmination of baking together influences from jazz, world music, folk and of course rock, embodied by what we could call, in very rough and very “loose” pigeonholing terms, a jazz-rock trio, has long since earned the pedigree of a highly esteemed act among music connoisseurs and those who treat themselves only to the best.

Moonlight SKy are oddballs who truly stand out in terms of expression. Not just in Slovenia, but worldwide. Without downplaying the weight, genius and talent of the rhythm section, but let’s be honest, the main engine and pillar that everything in Moonlight Sky revolves around is of course the “enfant terrible”, guitarist Miha Petric. This musician’s multilayered makeup is the driving axis of constant positive change, pushing the trio forward in creativity and in crafting completely unique musical forms.

The band, which once performed as a quartet, has two studio albums under its belt. A combination of circumstances has forced some adjustments on the group in recent years. A dozen new original tracks have piled up, but the band is waiting for favorable conditions to tackle a new studio release. Playing live, of course, knows no such “limitations”. Especially in the case of Moonlight Sky, where all boundaries are pretty much completely blurred,

The trio in acoustic form mostly presented newer creations, strictly instrumental in nature, with a tribute to the legendary ex-Yu rockers Leb i sol sprinkled in, who had a considerable influence on shaping how the members of Moonlight Sky hear and perceive music, and if my ears didn’t completely deceive me, the band also worked the track Chautauqua from its studio album “I Am” (2009) into the set. Yes. It’s awfully hard to talk about hard facts here, since the element of improvisation in Moonlight KSy is so strongly emphasized, rich and boundless that slapping genre shackles on them is totally inappropriate, thankless and, frankly, a blasphemous act toward the band.

So. The Moonlight Sky trio plays as if in a trance. The mileage is incredible, the three of them know each other fantastically well. And sense each other, too. The chemistry works flawlessly. Petric once again fascinated with his right hand, which, without any pick whatsoever, chases the supersonically accelerated work of his left with unsuspected, breathtaking lightning speed. But that wasn’t the main attraction of the evening, rather the whole yield of the three of them at work and the impressions such a performance leaves on the listener. The multifaceted musical character, the search for every last tiny bit of space in (seemingly unsolvable) forms so you can break them up and spice them up with fitting improvisational solutions, is the charm that enchants with its simultaneous unpredictability yet perfect calibration of all three building blocks, which sit in ideal musical symbiosis. The three-part concert left an impression of complete admiration and fascination at everything the one-of-a-kind universe called music can offer us. Especially if you know how to find and press the button labeled “no limits”.

To wrap up, let’s wish the guys just one thing. Given their multilayered design, may they get at least a keyboardist as soon as possible, with whom they can head into even sharper expressive profiling and touch new musical dimensions, which they can easily reach with the power and trump cards they already hold in the trio’s current lineup. Why am I aiming at this? Everything “progressive” we Slovenians have is more or less interesting jazz rock fusion bands. From the totally simple and formulaically defined, easygoing Feedback, whom you could play Ludo to, to more interesting ones like Salamndra salamandra or Zmajev rep.

Abroad, bands like Moonlight Sky are carried on hands, that’s how highly they’re valued for their artistry. I’m of course thinking of the developed world of Western Europe. From Italy to the Netherlands. In Canada, the music of Rush was declared a cultural monument by decree long ago. And here? The state doesn’t grant such creative bands so much as a crust of bread, let alone proudly protect the national significance of the cultural heritage of their work.

Predictions aren’t possible in the case of Moonlight Sky, but the fact is that the trio urgently needs an extra seasoning to refine and develop its overall sound. Whether with a vocal interpreter in the “theater play” vein of Peter Gabriel, an integration of woodwinds, keyboards and whatever else. Miha Petric is too versatile, too receptive and, in an artistic sense, long since grown out of just lingering in jazz forms, the kind that, say, Weather Report and/or Return To Forever once strolled through ages ago, and to this day we’ve seen multiple reincarnations of those forms in better or worse replicas.

photos: Aleš Podbrežnik