The Brooklyn Rail

BALKAN:MOST was the culmination of a four-year project to promote this Eastern European region’s music and culture, involving gigs, conferences, and a mentoring program. The initiative was organized by the Hungarian global sounds outfit Hangvető, situated in Budapest. Besides its English-language connotation, “most” also means “bridge” in several of the Slavic tongues. BALKAN:MOST operated in partnership with WOMEX, a highly influential German organization devoted to ethno-folkloric sounds from around the globe. The three-day festival and conference took place not in Budapest, but in Veszprém, which is the European Capital of Culture 2023. This quaint, historic city lies in the Balaton area of Hungary, which is primarily a holiday-making destination. This year, Veszprém has hosted mega-gigs by Kraftwerk and Iggy Pop, and on a more intimate scale, opened the FOTON multi-arts center, which acted as the smallest outdoor stage over the weekend. This was a free admission festival.

Most folks from outside the Balkans might consider its music to be primarily propellant wedding knee-uppers of sentimental and poignant combination, loaded with high-level virtuosity, as well as high alcoholic consumption and a predilection for after-midnight dancing wildness. Actually, when found in its hardcore folk-form, this is usually the case, the various ratios depending upon the time of day. BALKAN:MOST set out to encourage and explore Balkan players who fuse their heritage sounds with other forms, often jazz, electronic, rock, pop or Western European folk.

It must be pointed out that many of the highlight performances featured bands that kept the Balkan source unwatered. The five-piece Croatian vocal group Pjev have recently released Medna Roso (Red Hook Records, 2023), a mesmerizing album with the New Zealand alto saxophonist Hayden Chisholm (resident in Belgrade) and the English organist Kit Downes (resident in Berlin). On the outdoor FOTON stage, we listeners might have been reminded of the swooping microtonal Bulgarian approach, as the Zagreb-based group controlled their hollers with curt precision, exuding enormous energy and emotional heft. Operating with a severe vibrato, they also included a sense of humor, clearly relishing their feats, which surely amazed themselves as well as the audience. They changed physical positions around the microphone, and there’s likely a technical reason for this, as roles switched in the sonic semi-circle. The repertoire spans songs from Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina, interpreted in a precisely wild way, as if the singers have been possessed by an ultimate being, emanating the intensity of an avant rock combo but using only voices. They signal and push toward each other, guiding the dynamics, one or the other inching closer to the microphone, very much like a bluegrass outfit.

Balkalar are also from Zagreb, maintaining an acoustic strength with vigorously played fiddle, pinprick guitar, djembe/darbuka, and upright bass. Joint vocals abound. The opening song built slowly, moody and evocative, then the second palpitated uncontrollably, taking the spirits higher with a searing violin solo. They’ve been together for a decade, shaping their potent rapport, mixing a cauldron of ingredients from across the Balkans.

Ironically, France and Spain can also be hotbeds of Balkan exuberance. Two of the weekend’s best bands were La Caravane Passe (Paris) and the Barcelona Gipsy Balkan Orchestra. Their hearts were in folk, but their stance included rock power and hip hop beats. The Barcelona crew have also been together for a decade, powered by the Serbian acoustic bassist Ivan Kovačević, and featuring Italian lead singer Margherita Abita, who sounds well-versed in several languages when delivering material from Bulgaria, Macedonia, Turkey, and even Mexico. The extensive line-up features clarinet, fiddle, accordion, guitar and various North African percussion (bendir, darbuka).

La Caravane Passe approached from a different direction, valuing the heavy groove, fronted by a singer/rapper/trumpeter, opening with a low wedding party lope. This band is celebrating two decades together. Soprano saxophone and flugelhorn make their spiny pincers, and another singer strums acoustic guitar, folk-like. This is a heavily switching, multi-instrumental combo. Slick and entertaining, they still possess a number of crafty compositions that splice genres into surprising (and hook-lined) formations, such as “Gypsy For One Day,” making the funksome beats even heavier, and “Perdu Ta Langue,” with its goat-like alto saxophone solo. Another song is flamenco, with a trombone. Brutally entertaining, they work the crowd, but not at the expense of the pulse.

Fusion can enter from behind, creeping up surprisingly. Oratnitza claimed one of the weekend’s most unlikely line-ups, these Bulgarians matching vocalists with harsh electronics, processed flutes and didgeridoo drone-piping. The songs remained folkloric in essence, buoyed by quaking beats and extensive layering.

The peak of alarming combinations arrived with Lenhart Tapes, closing out the weekend after midnight, back on the FOTON stage. Vladimir Lenhart dices cassettes into a dark, dense, plummeting dubscape, using a pair of decks that look like shiny state-of-the-art models, chopped up and shunted by his mixer-module, old analogue surrounded by the delivery modes of now. The Dens album has just been released by the mighty Glitterbeat label, and features contributions from three singers. It’s difficult to pick out the stacked sources, to guess whether they’re vintage records or current field-capturings, but the end-of-line product is a heavy trundle, resonating with reed-pipe squalls and ultra-rumbling bass lines, as Lenhart literally fists his boxes for heightened emphasis. A whining electro-atonality is wedded to violent beat-splurges and roughened vocal presences. Your scribe envied the look of Lenhart’s gleaming twin-chrome cassette decks, the best platform for scrunched-distortion mangle-spool extremity. This is dub descended from Adrian Sherwood, and perhaps Pole, with free reeds that sound like they hail from Laos. Liver-ripping bass rolled around the picturesque garden-scape, polluting the post-1 a.m. air. This might be cultural appropriation run wild; is that sonic source from Tibet or Tanzania? Or reassuringly Balkan-baked in its origin? Around halfway through, Svetlana Spajić joined Lenhart, providing live vocals, metallic beats bashing a frame drum boom, workshop steam emitted, jaw harp distorted almost beyond recognition, as Lenhart fiddled with his decks, speed and pitch controls awry. This was the ultimate in creative Balkan fusion.