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Written in fRoots issue 333, 2011
 

DAKHABRAKHA
Na Mezhi
Guta Records, no number (2009?)

I was first alerted to what for me is a major recent discovery, DakhaBrakha, by a video on YouTube of three striking women in white wedding dresses and tall black Astrakhan hats, harmonising in mighty, steel-tearing Ukrainian white-voice, two of them pounding drums and the third digging into a folk-pattern-painted cello with massive abrasive energy, plus a male singer wielding accordion and trombone.
     I tracked them down on the net, and then at Womex by lucky chance ran into their manager, who gave me this CD and an even more dramatic video of a high-production-value live show in Kiev.
     The album is as exciting and powerful as I’d hoped. Insistent song melodies, gathered partly from the band’s trips to Ukraine’s villages, developed and made rich, fierce, dark and wild by overlaying and criss-crossing them, over grinding, propulsive textures of drums, wild cello, wheezing accordion, reedy-squealing zhaleika and bagpipe, bubbling trombone, narrowing focus to heart-rending, impassioned solo vocals.
     DakhaBrakha, whose name means ‘GiveTake’ in old Ukrainian and whose music is self-described as ‘ethno-chaos’, springs from and remains involved in the avant-garde theatrical work of Kyiv Centre Of Contemporary Art “Dakh”, which is based in a small playhouse in Kiev but performs internationally, including shows at London’s Barbican in 2007.
     The three women - Iryna Kovalenko, Olena Tsibulska and Nina Garenetska – first came together in a Kiev children’s vocal group. They sang one night at Dakh and caught the ear of its theatre director Vlad Troitskyi. He put together DakhaBrakha with the idea of “helping to open up the potential of Ukrainian melodies and to bring it to the hearts and consciousness of the younger generation in Ukraine and the rest of the world”, by means of a “radical montage” bringing in ideas and rhythms from other cultures and traditions, which came to include Bulgarian, Hungarian, Arabic and African. The dramatic visual presentation is designed by the band’s only male member, Marko Halanevych, an actor with Dakh who has studied folk culture and fell naturally into the quartet as male voice and player of accordion, trombone and didjeridoo.
     On the CD the band name is in Cyrillic, but the track-listing and some credits are in English, and there’s information in English at www.dakhabrakha.com.ua and www.myspace.com/dakhabrakha. Distribution doesn’t seem to be widespread, but boldly Googling should track it down.


© 2011 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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