Label: Celinka
Release date: 24.05.2016
Album length: 58.15 min
Production: Janez Križaj
Genre: Ethno / Folk / Neo-Classical
Rating: 9.0 / 10
Wild Strings Trio is another offbeat project, and all the more interesting for it. This time, Slovak musician Petra Onderufova (viola), French cellist Toby Kuhn and Slovenian guitarist Aleksander Kuzmič have “crossed” their instruments into a musical passion play all their own. Apart from three rearranged traditional folk songs of Balkan, or more precisely Macedonian, origin, the music on “Lost Weekend” is entirely the trio’s own.
The very combination of instruments, and even more the musical backgrounds the trio’s members come from, geographic origins included, hint that we’re in for a special musical adventure. Wild Strings Trio serves up an eclectic musical mix, marked by entirely instrumental music. The vivid musical macramé is woven from elements of neo-classical music and traditional folk melos (the trio most often turns to the Balkan peninsula for inspiration, but Celtic melancholy is no stranger to them either), with a dash of musical experimentation that also stirs up jazzy associations. Throughout the material, the three musicians develop an extraordinary, almost intuitive sense of each other as they come together in this seamless and utterly unique musical picture book. The way the threesome reads each other is simply phenomenal. “Lost Weekend” is a collection of incredible listenability, craftily decorated and seasoned with improvisational inserts. These are always subordinate to the leading motifs that hold the songs in a compact form, so the tight structure of the compositions is never at risk, not for a single moment. The expressive power of this album is, as a result, extraordinary. The occasional rhythmic wildness, especially when the trio charges headlong into Balkan sentiment, will automatically push your soul and body into motion.
“Lost Weekend” is an album brimming with passion and emotion. The trio responds to every stimulus with feeling, and the album is filled to the brim with wildly unbridled, playful performance, accompanied by exuberant playing. Then, in the next moment, the trio plunges toward vistas of melancholy and yearning sadness, as the soundscape fades out across fields of gently mystical Celtic folk. Bathed in a glow of subtle, sensual softness. Listening to the original song Snow Wolf, you’d think it was a rearranged traditional Irish or Scottish tune. The title track, meanwhile, presents in the best possible way the musical principle behind the visionary starting points of this trio’s creative sphere as a whole. In a single place, it delivers an effective coexistence of all three basic genre elements of the trio’s musical fusion.
What’s fascinating is precisely this effective merging of neo-classical elements with traditional folk melos and the inventiveness of the improvised inserts, into a homegrown, self-grown musical mix that has no equal and that, in the fiery performance this trio delivers, never stops thrilling and entertaining. The trio never runs out of fire or performance dynamite. From the first second of this album to the last. Although the viola takes the central role, the cello and guitar also earn plenty of room for solo adventures. The harmonizing of the sonic picture and the way it’s used are optimally exploited and filled out in the interplay of all three instruments. In that sense, “Lost Weekend” is an album you can’t add anything to or take anything away from. It simply sounds perfect.
No wonder “Lost Weekend” was recorded in the studio like a live performance. The sentiment it radiates is therefore genuine, distinctive and, as a result, instantly seductive. That’s why “Lost Weekend” counts as an album of extraordinary charisma, a polished musical calling card and authorial vision that wins you over right away with its uniqueness, its one-of-a-kind homegrown musical culture and its absolute sincerity.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Track list:
1. Lost Weekend
2. Seven7
3. Snow Wolf
4. Dragon
5. Safe
6. Boljše
7. Basicovica
8. Kopanica (Gankino Horo)
9. Jovano Jovanke
Line-up:
Petra Onderufova – viola
Toby Kuhn – cello
Aleksander Kuzmič – guitar, hulusi on track no. 3
