OFFest 2020 – BAKLAVA // Dobrila & Dorian Duo (DDD)

BAKLAVA

Baklava was formed in 2005 as a result of the bond between the individual musical experiences of its members in their personal projects as well as the collaboration with other musicians and bands. They started performing as a quartet, with a minimalist musical concept: the sound made by a female vocal and two string and one percussion instruments – the tambura and the bendir. Renouncing complex music forms and orchestrations, Baklava strives to express the perfection of simplicity, creating original music in a vivid dialogue with the aesthetic achievements of traditional Macedonian music. Apart from the remakes of Macedonian folk compositions, Baklava’s worldview is open to other folk traditions as well. So far, the band has recorded four albums: “Baklava” (2006), “Kalemar” (2008), “Me Mankas Mucho” (2011) and the new one “IV” (2020). They have contributed music to movie soundtracks and performed live in many different countries throughout Europe: Belgium, France, Spain, Germany, Czechia, Italy, Denmark, Turkey, Slovenia, Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria.
ELENA HRISTOVA vocal
DEJAN TEODOSIEVSKI cello
PETAR HRISTOV clarinet, sax
ALEKSANDAR NIKOLOVSKI trumpet
YORDAN KOSTOV accordion
DJ GOCE turntables
SIBO percussion

www.baklava.band

SEARCHING FOR THE MIRACLE…
Dobrila & Dorian Duo (DDD)

When one July evening, with the sound of the largest cricket’s chorus, two friends started a conversation about an idea for a new project, they could never imagine the course of the idea and to envision the music they would soon start to create. Dobrila and Dorian Duo (a team already known as part of Chalgia Sound System) started a soft “campaign” to amalgamate voice, oud and loops through improvisation. On one side, Dobrila sings Macedonian songs, but plays with silence as well, with notes that does not necessarily have to be a tone, as well as noise, and on the other, Dorian is playing the oud following the melody as in traditional Macedonian songs but also adding loops with a rhythmic and harmonic content to build a sonic infrastructure for layering maqams and western scales on top of each other. Dobrila gained the knowledge revealing the veil of the Macedonian musical heritage of Vanja Lazarova, Mirvet Belovska, Kiril Manchevski, but also influenced by free explorers of the different ways of singing and expressing. Dorian Jovanović whilst working on several of his projects (String Forces, Axiotomic, Dorian Oud Quartet) accumulated knowledge and experience which he reveals in full depth in this project that they named Amalgams. Whether it is due to the fusion of the known and the unknown, or due to the silence and the cricket’s chorus in Kozle, or due to the urge to find miracle through music…
Dobrila Grasheska – vocal
Dorian Jovanović – oud, loops