Begnagrad

Description

Originally released in Ljubljana, in 1982, it made a bigger splash when it was reissued in France, in 1990, on the AAYA label - through which route the band rapidly found its way to festival appearances, tours and fame on the more experimental wing of the non-classical European music community - who'd heard nothing like this before. Even in Yugoslavia, the band had come as a shock - and this at a time when there was a great deal of musical experimentation going on there, mostly Westen influenced. But Begnagrad came from home, adopting traditional instrumentation - accordion and clarinet -, rooting itself in the vocabulary of regional folk and dance music, only with added bass and drums (sometimes guitar) and a punk-jazz attitude - hurling the lot into a blender with jazz, rock, free jazz and noise to produce a highly stimulating, tuneful and usually twisty programme of accessible, though often complex, vocal and instrumental music, pitched somewhere between roots and avant-garde. This long-awaited reissue, remastered by Bob Drake and with a hell-for-leather bonus track, comes with an extensive booklet of documents, unseen photographs and a long essay on the popular musical history of Yugoslavia, it's unique position in the East-block, its little-known rock and experimental bands and culture, its public and private labels, its easy commerce with the West and, of course, detail on the genesis, evolution and demise of Begnagrad itself. As well as being a great 45 minutes of music, this is an important cultural document