discography
It’s Time to Head Home
(czas do domu)
cd 1996
The beginnings of the Orchestra were connected with hiking in the Polish mountains which fifty years ago were still inhabited by Lemko and Boyko Ruthenians. We wandered through abandoned valleys and saw the old terraced fields, orchards gone wild and forgotten paths. Who tilled these fields and trod the paths? How did those people get on? What made them happy? Or sad?
Of course ethnologists know the answers to these questions but it was much more interesting to seek them for ourselves. We tried to guess them from the exotic melodies and words of the local songs which we did not fully understand. It was through those songs that the Orchestra was founded; a "foot-bridge" from the here and now to those mountain villages of long ago.
Since traditional Polish folk music is almost too familiar to us and it comes from inhabited and well-known villages, one might think that we could do without such a bridge. But this is not the case; far from it. The customs this music was a part of have died out, the people who practised those customs have passed away, and the world in which they lived has disappeared.
In their world, unlike in ours, everything was living, had its own soul: animals, herbs, trees, earth, water and stones. What is more, this visible "real" world, coexisted with the other, "fantastic" one that was filled with phantoms, ghosts, and other strange creatures. People who created folk art were immersed in the invisible life that whirled and throbbed around them, sometimes helping them, sometimes doing them harm.
Our present world is full of ghosts of an entirely different nature. They inhabit TV sets, advertising boards, and colourful magazines. For many of us the real space we live in is the interior of a computer programme or the hierarchy of a bank. We are familiar with the earth by means of cakes, with herbs via sachets of spices and with water through taps. What kind of invisible life is whirling around us? What harm is it doing to us? What is it helping us to create?
And the most important question of all: are we able to reconcile our world with the world of the people who created what we now call folklore?
Songs:
- Marcinkowa konopielka [3:31]
- Żywieckie [4:25]
- Z tamtej strony jeziora [1:46]
- Korowajnoje ciasto [2:54]
- Malinowa konopielka [3:41]
- Cienki lenek [2:33]
- Oj, siadaj, siadaj [3:08]
- Piosenka pasterska [2:06]
- Jegodziny [2:26]
- A w niedzielę [3:58]
- Z wysokiego pola [3:13]
- Pieśń sobótkowa [8:45]
- Wyrządzaj się [4:27]
- Czworak dworski [2:54]
- Zaszło słonko [3:17]
- Czas do domu [4:28]
