Q. In your home country you’re known as the ‘Ukrainian Bjork’ – is that a fair comparison? And what would you say you have in common with Bjork?
Sometimes, I think, such comparisons are needed to help people to find an orientation, to name a ‘shell’; a label to put on somebody.
I do love Bjork and I had a chance to meet her in New York few years ago - I love the honesty in her voice, and I love her braveness in risking new sounds. But for my own work I could find much easier connections to the work of Diamanda Galas or Eva Bittova.
Q. You collect traditional songs and stories from the Ukraine – how important is it to keep alive these folk traditions?
Somebody once said, that if you try to conserve the tradition it will die. There is nothing more moving and changing than tradition. I think it will be such a pity to lose all the richness and variety of our different cultures; it will be so horrible to awake one day in a world of unified fast food culture. In this sense, I think it is very important to study traditional art, in my case the Ukrainian tradition, to keep it alive. Not through conservation, but more through development and dialogue with it. So that tradition can be a powerful source of energy and inspiration, but not a cage, not a prison of new ideas and possibilities.
Q. Can you describe how you first came to hear village singing?
Once, when I was 18 years old, I was in the Carpathian Mountains in the Ukraine for a vacation. We were backpacking through the mountains and we stayed for a rest in a small, remote village up in the hills. We asked for water at one house and sat there for a moment talking to the old lady, who lived there. She sat with us, just relaxing and then suddenly she began to sing. It was not really for us - it was just because she wanted to sing. Her voice was not ‘clean’ and perfect, it was somehow rough, full of mini-ornaments. Everything was part of her song - breath, sigh, sounds of the birds, whisper of the wind, the warm sunlight, the whole nature around us...something in her voice was like she opened a gate to a connection to ancient times. I was mesmerised and I started to try to write down the notes, trying to catch it. This was the first impulse for my whole future work, travels and expeditions, and first step towards singing myself.
Q. How do you update traditional songs and music for a modern audience? Why is it important to do this?
Imagine this situation: one woman is singing you a song, then, in another village, just 5km away, another woman will sing you the same song completely different. Even more, the same singer will perform the same song differently each time, with small nuances, details, pauses, melodic changes. Fedir Rozdabara from the village Kriachkivka once told me: ‘You have to love a song like your beloved. You carry it so long in your heart, till you know how to sing it...’
This is how I work, I’m not trying to change, to arrange the song. I am trying to carry it in my heart and to hear, how I can sing it? I cannot avoid all the influences of contemporary music and today’s sounds. Plus, I am working with strong musician partners coming from various music scenes - jazz or electronic, rock or new music. So all this enters and influences how my song will sound like.
But I must repeat - it is the music, which tells you, how she may be sung. The ‘update’ is coming from inside, from the heart, not from the wish to make it more accessible to a modern audience. This is a very mysterious and amazing creative process.
Q. What would you like to tell an English audience about your music – do you have a message?
In many traditions there is this idea of your own song. In the Ukraine very often somebody will tell me “now I am singing you my own song”. Usually this doesn’t mean that this person composed it, but that the song has become a powerful part of their life, like a talisman, which supports them and helps them to get through the good and the bad times.
Further than that, I am also very interested in the ritual function of song; how people believe in influencing nature and life though the voice, communicating with ‘other words’: where simple words are not enough, poetry and music helps. I love this idea - sometimes I would say I am singing for Ukraine, about Ukraine, I am singing Ukraine… going through a very hard time at the moment...
Q. Would you introduce your partner German percussionist and electronica specialist Christian Thomé?
I met Christian Thomé few years ago, when I was looking for a musician partner to try out something new for me, something not yet explored. When we started our first rehearsals we both didn't know in what way our common music would develop. I was curious to try not to use Ukrainian traditional songs, to work in a more abstract way. Christian was interested to explore possibilities of dialogue between percussion instruments and the human voice. Very soon we both felt how much we can share between us and how much we can open our own borders and perspectives to each other.
What I really appreciate about Christian’s music is that he is not just looking for sound effects, but he is going deep into the meaning of the songs, and trying to find his own answer, his own connection to it. What fascinates me most is how Christian balances on the border between manual and digital sounds. A bit like a master acrobat on the tightrope. Working with him is real challenge for me, it is exciting, and I feel there are lots of possibilities of development ahead of us.
Q. Can you describe your home town Lviv in Western Ukraine?
If you visit Lviv for the first time, you may find a lot of similarity in atmosphere with Prague, Krakow or Vienna. The city was founded in the mid 13th century by a Ukrainian prince who build it for his son, Lev (which means lion). So Lviv is the city of a Lion. We do have lots of stone lion sculptures, and after the legend, they come alive at night and take care of the town. Lviv is a city built by Italian architects, where Mozart use to perform, where Armenian, Jewish, Polish and Ukrainian people use to live together, and where Leopold von Sacher-Masoch used to write. Is this enough advertising for all of you to come and see it with your own eyes!?
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| Mariana Sadovska (photo by Kluczenko) |
