Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Ljubljana / SiTi Teater / Slovenia
Concert date: 25.01.2013
Attendance: 220
Ticket price: €15.00 / €18.00
When it comes to musical experimentation hurled into the century-old template of recognizable tunes from Slovenia’s folk music landscape, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a bigger artistic high point than what the sextet Katalena delivers these days. Twelve years running now. Same lineup, too: Vesna Zornik on vocals, Polona Janežič on keys, Boštjan Gombač on winds and the rest of the folk exotica, Boštjan Narat on guitar, Tibor Mihelič Syed on bass and Robert Rebolj on drums.
A lot has been said about Katalena by now, but this is music that would need its own doctoral expert. And even that wouldn’t be enough, nor is it worth trying. Plain and simple: you never hit bottom. Its many facets and the countless shades of the musical landscape they create seem to have no end and no edge, and that’s exactly the greatest fascination of the energy we call music, the thing we were sent here to enjoy. Few bands have won such freedom for themselves, with a piercing, auteur genius for arrangement and a prism of homegrown, self-sprung artistry, the way Katalena has. They’re one of a kind on a global scale, and people abroad know it very well too, since Katalena has already thrilled audiences at full dose on international stages.
Especially when the talk turns to creating a bewitchingly hypnotic atmosphere that grabs the listener in a firm grip and doesn’t let go for the whole gig. SiTi Teater, with its excellent room acoustics, couldn’t have been a better location for conjuring up this world.
The gig in the packed SiTi Teater kicked off with a sweeping calibration of the instrumentalists. That kind of free-spinning experimental platform is exactly what the song Dež offers. An experimental number with room to roam, where things on the edge of improvisational disconnect unfold with a whiff of unexpected motifs that nonetheless keep teasing and stirring the ear the whole way through. It’s a rich landscape of light, unobtrusive shades, passed back and forth between guitar and winds, while in the background of this intro a gentle Balkan veil keeps watch, given its organic grounding by an active bass line.
In Shod, Vesna Zornik sneaks onto the stage like a little mouse from the background, and the band’s lineup on stage is complete. Katalena is a sextet. Sure, during gigs the front line of Narat-Zornik-Gombač grabs most of the attention, but you can clearly feel in the band’s playing that it’s a cohesion of six equally effective entities, each generating its own sonic flux – which reaches its crescendo in an eclectically dynamic puzzle of a unique musical form. Take away just one of the six and the whole concept collapses in an instant, like a house of cards. Every member of the sextet plays an integral role in the Katalena story, and what each brings is practically essential. At the start Vesna’s vocals sat a bit too low in the mix, but later the techs put her voice in the right spot too.
After a more generous dosing of the current album »Noč Čarovnic« in the first two thirds of the show, the band ramped up the performance toward the end, and the first peak in the final third came with (Rad imel bi) Jabuko, a song the audience adopted as its own long ago. The crowd suddenly came alive and shook off the hypnotic daze, clapping along on autopilot to keep the tempo. Older material follows, with the one-of-a-kind Lisica standing out in particular, and the gig closes with one more song from the beloved album »Kmečka ohcet«, the reworked folk song Oj božime.
The show was further stoked by the mischievous duo of Narat and Gombač, who in the breaks between songs added a theatrical spark with on-stage skits that would fit right into a »stand up comedy« spectacle. In those moments of crazy lucidity the two guys especially put their acting chops to work, which are simply an integral part of the band’s shows. What was particularly contagious was the intellectual undertone of certain carefully wrapped blossoms of everyday reality, which they served up to the bread-and-circuses crowd at SiTi Teater. Vesna Zornik is a chapter of her own, and it’s incredible how supple, soft and fragile her voice floats in the soundscape built by the instrumentalists. Vesna naturally took the main focus with her layered dose of sensitivity, which sparkled fully in the gentlest moments of the concert’s musical delicacy, while at the same time dizzyingly flipping those moments into bursts of energetic, piercing vocal excess, seasoned with a polished sense of theatricality
A whiff of avant-garde clings to Katalena, and with every work the band only ripens further in that department. A touch of unpredictable turns is firmly built into the song arrangements, with the songs unfolding through an intelligent fusion of many genres, from funk, jazz and blues to world music,,… and the feeling of spontaneous development that goes with this kind of stage show is impressive too. Lisica, played toward the end of the gig, is the culmination of this exceptional coexistence of a traditional folk tune with doses of current genre cues, which tickle the receptors very pleasantly while stirring things up with a sense of the »unheard-of« – the opening vocal duet of Zornik and Janežič is extremely contagious in this respect, and the song even rocks out in the middle when Narat solos on his »F-hole« Telecaster. After Gombač’s early quip that Narat’s guitar also hits notes the band doesn’t need, Narat paid him back during the show by theatrically teasing Gombač through the mic before his entrances, on his solos on clarinet, whistles, mini trumpets, little saxophones and other rattly exotic props.
Exceptional chemistry, exceptional tightness, exceptional focus. Countless gigs, years of playing together and knowing each other! That remarkable chemistry cast a spell over SiTi Teater, which even after the encore had a hard time shaking itself out of its daze. Katalena simply keeps ripening, and with every show confirms that it remains one of the top stage attractions, offering, with the tangible substance of its musical message, staged as full-blooded theater and a haul of raw emotion, a fascinating realization of a unique musical experience. A singular musical world, a world created by the musical language of the one and only Katalena.
Setlist
1. Dež
2. Shod
3. Zeleni Jurij
4. St. Lawdič
5. Zvezda
6. Ne orji, ne sejaj – Gizdava
7. Pastirče mlado
8. Ta solbaška
9. Šla bom na goro visoko
10. Noč čarovnic
11. (Rad imel bi) Jabuko
12. Lucija
13. Lisica
14. Komur se dremlje
15. Zrelo je žito
16. Oj božime
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