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Written in fRoots issue 338/339, 2011


ETHNO TRIO TROITSA
Zimachka
Vigma 3666-1 (2011)

Not many releases come this way from Belarus, the land-locked and still politically unrelaxed country surrounded by the Baltic states, Poland, Ukraine and Russia, but several of those have been earlier releases from Minsk trio Troitsa, and they chart the progress to this sixth album.
     Ivan Kirchuk is the possessor of one of those real, rumbling bass voices that seem to flourish in Russia and its near neighbours, and conjure mental images of a huge bearded Cossack in boots and floor-length furs.
     He formed the original trio in 1996 to perform the traditional material he’d been finding since the 1980s in the villages of Belarus. After its first album the group broke up, but after a pause Kirchuk recruited Yuri Dmitriev and Yuri Pavlovsky, who supplement his armoury of 12-string guitar, domra, gusli, jew’s-harp, whistles, zhaleika and more with guitar, bass, domra, kalimba and percussion.
     His singing tends to stay down in the gravelly basement, accessing tones that an epic film-trailer voice-over artist would kill for, but on occasion he rises through the frequencies, right up to a rather finely-controlled falsetto-alto.
     Zimachka (‘Winter’), recorded in Poland, is a remarkable and rather impressive thing of wild rhythmic pulses and gutsy instrumental textures massive enough to match the Eisenstein-sized drama of Kirchuk’s declamatory, welkin-ringing rendering of traditional songs brought a long way from the village but nevertheless still sounding like nothing in western Europe.
All the text on the package is in Cyrillic, but www.troitsa.net has information in English.

© 2011 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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