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Written in fRoots issue 325, 2010
 

OJRA & KIRITCHENKO
A Tangle Of Makosha
Nexsound nsp 05 / The Lollipoppe Shoppe LSCD 010 (2010)

A find from Ukraine. The packaging is hardly value-adding – a slim jewel-case with a single sheet insert – but this is a CD that’ll be among my picks of 2010 and I’m glad to have it as a physical object rather than a list of file-names.
      It’s Ukrainian traditional music, mostly from the east of the country, interpreted by a group of musicians from Kharkiv liberatingly un-hidebound by folk-band approaches in other countries. Accompanying the edgy, unaffected traditional singing of Halyna Breslavets is a constantly interesting ‘ethnotronic’ mix of Andrey Kiritchenko’s sparsely clicking, plinking, shuffling, looming electronics and the rest of the quartet Ojra’s inventive, non-standard use of acoustic string, wind and percussion instruments including violin, slide guitar, bayan, dvoyanka, bass and dulcimer.
      The songs are the result of Ojra’s members’ collecting over the past ten or so years, and the airy treatment, abstract, never touching on any obvious imagery but deeply sympathetic, lets them breathe, uncluttered by the excursions into folk dance music or overt displays of instrumental chops that can get in the way in western European folk-bands’ music.
      The insert lists the tracks and personnel, but doesn’t mention that there’s a MySpace site, www.myspace.com/ojrakiritchenko. Read no more here; seek out and listen to five tracks there. The CD and remarkably inexpensive downloads of its ten tracks are available from Kiritchenko’s label at www.nexsound.org. (And it appears from something I read at www.lollipopshop.de that it might be available in a more substantial pack than the one sent for review).


© 2010 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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