“Poravna”, translating as “straight”, “wide“ or “elongated song”, is usually considered a metaphor for the entire genre of Bosnian sevdah music – that peculiar Balkan musical treatment of melancholy love desire – characterised as it is by long-note, drawn-out and ornamented melodies, traditionally sung without accompaniment or with sparse instrumentation (e.g. with only the “saz” or „šargija“ as variants of the “bağlama”). But the title alone can be misleading: for the lip-service this album pays to tradition is anything but a simple celebration, as the music presented here aims to experiment with traditional forms, turning them inside-out and deconstructing them, rather than conserving them. Indeed, instead of recreating or assuming tradition, or even hybridising it, Vesna Pisarović and her musical partners – Noël Akchoté, Tony Buck, Greg Cohen and Axel Dörner – place traditional forms out of sync – by means of improvisations, displacements and experiments – inviting us to an idiosyncratic musical world which is difficult to categorise, as it is entirely made of sonic tensions, contrasts, even contradictions.
Recorded during two live sessions between Berlin and Zagreb, separated by the pandemic time-lapse, this album is also a personal and conceptual homage to Vesna’s place of birth and its diverse, dense and difficult musical history and geography. The distance thus consciously assumed – which is perhaps the basic artistic operation here – also echoes and extends a personal distance taken in her artistic career, away from her status as a Croatian and Yugoslav pop star with platinum records, towards projects and collaborations of a completely different mould, within free jazz and experimental music. This is how we find her here, as in a fairy tale of sonic experiments, alongside the ardent electric and acoustic improvisations of members of the Necks, Masada and Zeitkratzer, or in an intimate musical dialogue with Akchoté.
The result? Traditional forms and melodies are superimposed against the backdrop of noise and improvisations – becoming vehicles for collective experiments, sung lyrics eerily displaced in their texture and meaning from any firm conveying of sense, creating a mystical interplay with droning or looping sounds of the instruments. In the end, whether this is avant-folk or punk-Sevdah, or something else, the strange slow melancholy beauty of this music cannot fail to mesmerize.
