Tijana StankoviC & Miroslav Tóth
Free improvised archetyps
photos: Michal Rešetka
As the album title hints, ‘SZ’ is particularly frail. Weighty with heaviness and melancholy, songs come with poetic, but sharp exclamation mark. It is ultimately about our inner lives and thoughts, our internal musical worlds which connect, intertwine, counterpoint or oppose along the lines of its joint borders.
‘SZ’ is defined by an embrace of the universal archetypes of symbols, genres and styles. It is built by cacophonous layers of noise and uneven tunings, reflecting each line in different distorted mirror. Sometimes if feels like a pseudo heterophony, it occurs intuitively while flowing with brutal intensity, pushing the borders with maximum strength and suddenly exploding in chaos of frequencies. That makes for a dense, and at the times oddly sound of matching folk-inspired fragments of melody and words with more abstract free improvisation.
We would like to dedicate this release to the healing and recovery of all those who have difficulty distinguishing between what is real and what is imaginary; may be unresponsive or withdrawn; and may have difficulty expressing normal emotions in social situation.
(text by Tijana Stanković)
Dedicated to all those who are affected with schizophrenia.
The meeting with Tijana Stankovic has become crucial in the sense that we reached for a music connecting folklore archetypes in the most straight and raw form with contemporary music using the free improvisation. Although, the music stays sensitively fragile, often intimate and mourning and different at every concert since we create the music models during playing. Actually, when I think about it, we apply many practices which were known, researched and examined by Béla Bartók. It is a compelling argument why to play this music. Tijana, appart from being a musician, is also an ethnographer. And when we realize that, similarly to Iva Bitová, she both sings and plays violin, we find out that there appears a new quality of music, which happens to pop up in our region every once in a while.
Stretnutie s Tijanou Stanković sa stalo kľúčovým v tom, že sme siahli po hudbe spájajúcej folklórny archetyp v najpriamejšej, oholenej a surovej podobe so súčasnou hudbou využívajúcou voľnú improvizáciu. Pritom ostáva hudba senzitívne krehká, často intímne smútočná a na každom koncerte iná, keďže hudobné modely si vytvárame počas hrania. Vlastne, keď si to tak uvedomím, množstvo postupov, ktoré uplatňujeme mal na mysli, poznal a skúmal Béla Bartók. To je nepriestrelný argument prečo túto hudbu hrať. Tijana je okrem hudobníčky aj etnografkou. A keď si uvedomíme, že rovnako ako Iva Bittová spieva a zároveň hrá na husle, tak prídeme na to, že sa navracia nová kvalita hudby, ktorá sa raz za čas objaví v našej oblasti.
(Miroslav Tóth)