Dine Doneff - Rousilvo

NERED MUSIC

£14.53

Cat. no: NERED1
Format: CD
Barcode: 0761856024816
Release Date: 2nd April 2021
Genre: Jazz

Macedonian composer/multi-instrumentalist Dine Doneff (or Kostas Theodorou, his Greek citizenship name) presents his Balkan-jazz-folk-opera ‘Rousilvo’ and the first release on neRED music in cooperation
with ECM Records.

Heavily influenced by the culture of his homeland, Doneff, creates a musical fabric through open dialogue among the members of a septet. A polyphony of seven women’s voices, interspersed with extracts from numerous authentic field recordings, complete a narration of expanding rhythmic and melodic forms.

Rousilvo is the old, Slavic name of the village of Xanthogeia, in north western Greece. The village’s name, and its Slav-Macedonian speaking community, fell victim to the policy of the Greek state to forcibly “Hellenize” the land and its people. At the end of the Greek Civil War (1946-49) most of the women in the village were left alone for the rest of their lives; their husbands either killed or exiled. Since 1986 the village has been uninhabited as a result of long-lasting social marginalization.

Ten compositions, alternating with location recordings of the surviving elderly residents of the village (sometimes singing, at times narrating their stories) salvaging and transforming a treasure trove, an elegy, of a vanishing poetry.

Tracks: Narrative / Penelopes Of Xanthogeia / Oblivion / Mirka / Natsko / Requiem / Ajde Sl’intse Zajdi / Apatris / Kaimaktsalan / Implacable Grief / Song Of The Unquietness / As A Story