Yodel in Hi-Fi: From Kitsch Folk to Contemporary Electronica

Eastern Europe

They have discreetly pointed out killers still living within shouting distance, still working their fields and tending their flocks, still smiling as they stroll by the house on their way home. . . . Zvijezda [is covered with] forests of beech, oak, and pine as well as rolling pasturelands, meadows . . . the aroma of manure, pine resin, and wood fires along with the . . . the screech of birds of prey, the tinkle of cowbells, and the “Yeoooo! Yeoooo” of peasant men and women summoning one another as they tend their flocks or work their fields. Life . . . has made these peasants cautious even in their singsong calls to one another. I once heard Huso Celik’s lifelong friend, a Serb named Dragoljub Radovanovic, yodel to his wife, Zora, one spring afternoon. The Bosnian war had ended by then, or seemed to have ended. Zora and her sister were down in a meadow below their cinderblock house. They were using a pair of paper scissors to shear their sheep and were stuffing the fleece into plastic bags. “Yeoooo! Yeoooo!” Dragoljub called down to them. “Come on hoommme! Someone’s commme to visit.” “We’rrre commmmmin’,” I heard Zora yodel from the meadow below. “We’rrre almmmmooossst dooonnne.”1 This poignant story illustrates the f/utility of yodeling. I looked Zvijezda up on a map—a town in the middle of Bosnia (also towns with same name in Croatia and Serbia ). I like the truths maps tell. For instance, our atlas has a page called the Alpine States and it includes Slovenia . Of course, Germany and Italy could also be included but they have their own pages. That Slovenia is considered Alpine may be a geopolitical consequence of its joining the EU. The forgotten countries of Eastern Europe have become places where lots of interesting things happen —including yodeling. I backpacked through Yugoslavia in  with then-partner-artist Valerie, naively experiencing it as a fragile mosaic of natural beauty and brittle alliances between various ethnic groups then united as states. The people we met were cautiously hopeful about this unique “United States” of “enlightened socialism”—looking both to the East and West. This rosy vision couldn’t have been more wrong— hope betrayed by nationalism?—but since the Balkan War(s), Balkan states like Bosnia and Herzegovina have regained their capacity to adapt to modern musical styles, Western genres, and the Eurovision contest. Unpolitical music functions as healer, as frivolity overcomes the stark dreariness of the recent past—may a thousand pop songs bloom. Eastern Europe   THE LANDS OF YO Anna Nacher: Magic Voice of the Carpathians Anna Nacher is the voice of the Magic Carpathians Project (MCP), founded in  by Nacher and Marek Styczynski, and sounds like nothing else—imagine acousmatic psycho-geographical ethno-ambient. The Carpathians slink from the Tatras in Slovakia along the Polish border through southern Ukraine, ultimately unfurling in Romania. This Polish combo was influenced by Eastern European and Carpathian Mountains roots music. But one also hears free jazz, Alice Coltrane, Indian music, Gregorian chant, and resonant, minimal ambient. MCP, like classical composers, borrows from the old to reinvent the new with everything from traditional instruments to homemade analog electronics. Nacher’s voice lends itself well to uniting mountain roots musics with manipulated found sounds and radio waves, tapping into the natural ambiences found in nature: the wind, earth, wildlife, yodels, and throat singing. MCP has toured extensively throughout North America and Europe. In autumn  I asked Nacher where her vocals come from. AN: Being a self-taught musician, I’ve been inspired by both ethnic tradition and contemporary experimental vocal techniques. The former include the plethora of throat-singing techniques, which are much more than famous harmonic singing from Tuva or other regions in central Asia. Some of these techniques can be found in the Balkans and Carpathians and also belong to this family, although they may be slightly different when it comes to nuances of voice emission. What they have in common is a very sophisticated use of vocal folds and application of laryngeal movements in order to produce a strong voice, which uses intentionally produced “cracks” [like the one heard in traditional Bulgarian folk techniques], with the intensive support coming from diaphragm. BP: What these vocals, yours included, present is a dynamic tension between ambient—fusion of voice and vista— and vocal imperfections, techniques, character details, which spotlight the human in the soundscape so that one both melts into the landscape and emerges gloriously out of the...