Ethnotrip : Kdo bo pil iz bistrega studenca?

Label: Celinka
Year of release: 2016
Production: Ethnotrip & Dejan Berden
Album length: 39.43
Genre: Folk / Ethno

Ethnotrip is a band that has been around since 2009. Three years ago they first made a real splash with an excellent self-titled studio debut. For its follow-up, the new album “Kdo bo pil iz bistrega studenca?”, the band from Prekmurje went in even more ambitiously than on the debut and picked songs that are once again geographically stretched between the Balkan peninsula (Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia) and Eastern Europe (Russia, Hungary) – and one of them is even in English. They certainly didn’t skip a nod to Slovenian (Prekmurje) folk melos either (Snočkar so me zgrabil), and there’s the Međimurje number Poveč golob. These songs opened up extra room for musical experimentation when it came to picking arrangements, improvisation above all, which let Ethnotrip tackle their new album on an even grander scale and be even more “self-challenging” in discovering who they are.

Tjaša’s vocals remain the most recognizable, most striking figure in the musical tale of Ethnotrip. With her wonderfully sensual, refined, fragile approach she comes across in the verses as almost flawlessly, virginally pure, with a constant sense of longing, while the melancholy that defines the character of the album’s melos is magnified and underlined even more through her interpretation of the lyrics. A stunning performance and an outstanding voice. Once again.

Anyway, it’s clear the band is drawn to “puzzling” rhythms where, if you’re careless with your steps, you can break both legs. Okay, you just have to pick the right dance and you’ll be fine. In short, the band has a blast wrestling with the odd meters of Eastern rhythms. There’s plenty of that on the album, and Tjaša’s mystically alluring voice and that rhythmic “exotica”, together with a proud and unique instrumental weave full of colorful yet compact playfulness (especially the gentle play of the harmonious dialogue between violin and piano), give the record its special charm. Its strictly organic nature is also an imprint of the live shows, since the album was recorded entirely at two consecutive concerts in their hometown of Lendava. No after-the-fact studio fixes or cosmetics.

The studio debut came across as a bit cautious – the band picked some folk song standards that had already been through plenty of arrangement makeovers by many groups in the past – but with it Ethnotrip made it clear that this is first and foremost a group striving to keep a melodic backbone and compact arrangements. Even though the guys and the girl show they’re outstanding musicians who can, at any moment, burst out in a vivid string of improvisational acrobatics, one thing is clear. The core of the compact song format stays untouched, and the group has no use for fragmentation (fraying the motifs for the sake of a surplus of improvised inserts). The jazz element is there only in shades, as an extra, welcome spice that loosens up the arrangements. In the instrumental middle sections the band would rather flirt with melodic modulations, which effectively shakes up the moods (reinforcing and underlining the very “folksiness” of it all), while keeping the listenability high the whole way through.

So folk melos rules over the songs, and in the performance you quickly realize that this interpretation, as radiated by the character of the album (content and atmosphere included), could only have come from the wide plains of Prekmurje. Which makes it unique. Just like the sound of the group, which Ethnotrip only deepen with the album “Kdo bo pil iz bistrega studenca?”. The transformation of folk melos within the musical vision of Ethnotrip has therefore fully succeeded. In this story the band emerges as an entity with its own recognizable musical character that comes across as one of a kind, that is, unique. And that’s the ultimate goal of every musical performer, as long as they’re honest about what they do. In its warm, sensual, organic creation of sonic liveliness, the album “Kdo bo pil iz bistrega studenca?” feels gentle and fragile, chemically supple and picturesque all at once, and the interplay of the building blocks of the sound is incredibly in sync throughout. The band members read each other superbly at all times. You can feel they’re tightly bonded, breathing for a common cause, on the same wavelength when the talk turns to music, and that they’ve played a ton of gigs together. From all this we can conclude that the album “Kdo bo pil iz bistrega studenca?” is an incredibly bold and brave move and one of the most beautiful documents out there, one that will irreversibly seduce and enchant even the true folk purist, in a free-spirited reworking of folk music’s vocabulary, heading toward a new musical dimension. That new musical dimension is called Ethnotrip. May it keep growing and developing in its enchanting musical fairy tale.

author: Aleš Podbrežnik
rating: 9.0 / 10