Label: Celinka
Release date: October 1, 2019
Production: Wild Strings Trio & Leander Meuris
Album length: 52.57 min
Genre: Ethno-Art Fusion
Rating: 9.5 / 10
Wild Strings Trio are back after a good three years with their second studio release, which they’ve named “Bendjistan”. Their debut “Lost Weekend” already wowed the critics wholeheartedly, won them over and made it clear that, not just in Slovenia but on the wider international scene, a new shining star had risen in the field of genre-defying ethno and folk fusion with elements of classical music, a star that adds up to a fun fourteen strings and can’t be ignored any longer. Violin, guitar and cello! When these instruments cross paths and weave together into a one-of-a-kind, thrilling musical conglomerate, they invite you into a picturesque world of musical adventure!
But to achieve the uniqueness and musical singularity that comes with this international trio based in Ljubljana, namely Petra Onderufova (Slovakia, violin), Toby Khun (France, cello) and Aleksander Kuzmič (Slovenia, guitar), you need a few extra prerequisites on top of dazzling technical chops. The first one is obvious. The three musicians come from completely different musical backgrounds, which means that as individuals, in how they perceive music and in how they’ve been honed by past projects and an enormous amount of musical mileage, they were already very different from each other right from the starting point. But all that effort would have been in vain if, in 2014 when the band was formed, the magic hadn’t kicked in and the chemistry hadn’t clicked, which is how Wild Strings Trio managed to fuse three musical worlds into a majestically challenging and unconventional debut, with a brilliant premise of a whirlwind march into the blessed expanses of untamed, raging ethno fury.
So what Wild Strings Trio so successfully pulled off on their lovely studio debut “Lost Weekend”, they now deepen, expand and keep nurturing on the new record “Bendjistan”. “Bendjistan” also carries on fearlessly reaching for that boundless, thrilling fusion of ethno and folk music from the Balkan Peninsula, the melos of Eastern Europe and Celtic music, and it dares to reach for flamenco again too. This ethno-folk premise is so strong and all-present that the element of classical music sneaks into the band’s vocabulary through the “back door” and works as a welcome spice in the arrangements. On the other hand, there’s one more juicy ingredient that boosts the variety of the compositions. The jazz element, though it’s secondary and not essential, is very much welcome. Wild Strings Trio once again approach everything with great commitment and real passion, which makes them sound incredibly incisive and unbelievably convincing in performance. The magic they create grabs me right away, whisks me off right away, enchants me in an instant. The manifesto of bubbling passions and emotions on “Bendjistan” is a story of its own kind and an important building block of this release’s high quality.
As expected, “Bendjistan” is very much alive. Played like a live gig. The execution of the material is astonishing in its free-spinning kinetics, in the combination of speed and precision generated by the members of the trio. It demands a great deal of constant focus, which in turn gives you, while listening, that welcome feeling of unpredictable twists, since we witness a heap of sudden motif switches, changes of rhythmic keys and, as said, a touch of “performance reality” that makes you feel like you’re on stage with the band the whole time you’re listening to the substance of this achievement. The trio’s sense of each other is phenomenal, and that’s no longer news.
Compared to the debut, this time around the trio has delivered almost entirely original material for the new album. Only one traditional folk tune snuck in, originating from Macedonia and called Berovka, and after adapting the arrangements and “translating” it into the format of their own musical vision, the band playfully changed its title to Beherovka (the band used this kind of wordplay when naming the tracks on the debut too). In this respect too, “Bendjistan” feels even more ambitious and speaks with far greater confidence than the otherwise excellent debut. As the album title itself hints, it couldn’t be more fitting. With it, the band has expanded and cemented its unique musical style of “multiple ethno art” fusion, first established on the debut. You can feel that all the gigging in different parts of the world has left the trio burdened with a higher degree of artistic maturity, and that’s how the compositions come across too, each possessing its own strong expressive charisma and character.
Doubling motifs and harmonizing is a constant in the arrangements, while the band keeps the atmosphere in constant dynamic motion, building tension in the songs either by speeding up the rhythm and the delivery of a motif round after round, or by simply calming things down. At the same time, the group does this through a witty blending of motifs, laying bare emotions from bitter melancholy to cheeky exuberance that pushes body and soul into a dance step! Not only is the merging of three musical worlds more than successful and fully satisfying in terms of the album’s tangible eclectic flavor, but it’s precisely this lucidly cheeky side that gets plenty of emphasis, so that Wild Strings Trio, true to their name, “wildly” shower the listener with a big helping of positive vibes full of cheerfulness, even though the melos they cling to, imbued with “arabesques”, can also reveal bitterness, anxiety, in short, a gloomier side.
“Bendjistan” is, then, a mystical world that is born every time you put this CD in the player and three bards gathered under the wing of the trio of “wild strings” start playing for you. The very same world is born at every single Wild Strings Trio gig. A world that is unique and repeatable only by Petra, Toby and Aleksander.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Tracklist:
1. Pumpovica (04:59)
2. Šarenica (04:59)
3. Who Knows Where (07:13)
4. Bendjistan (08:03)
5. Balajda (05:08)
6. 5am (05:19)
7. Meherovka (05:00)
8. Beherovka (05:32)
9. Kanta (06:38)
Lineup:
Petra Onderufova – violin
Aleksander Kuzmič – guitar, vocals
Toby Kuhn – cello
Guest musician:
Leander Meuris – clarinet on track no. 9
