Serbian War Songs

This extraordinary, uncompromising and intense collaboration between Berlin-based hyper-contemporary ensemble Zeitkratzer and a few singers specialising in traditional Serbian-language folklore is a challenging and thoroughly convincing meditation on songs emerging from Serbia's bleak experiences of World War I. For the most part the two groups remain separate, the sound of the two voices jammed together to generate dense overtones. At other times the instrumentalists' references to natural sounds – the creak and whine of rigging for example – support a more relaxed vocal style. In ‘Assassination in Sarajevo’, Gavrilo Princip (assassin of Franz Ferdinand) becomes both tragic hero of the anti-colonial struggle and a figure in a mythic dreamscape, the ensemble emerging to cover the singer and his one-stringed gusle, like the high harmonics of a mourning bell. Even the most light-hearted song, ‘Shvabo Came’, is undercut by an eerie droning and by the obliteration of parts of the melody, as though it had been taken from a burned and fragmentary songbook. A dark but powerful vision.