Album Review: V/A - Shantel / Bucovina Club Volume 2 (Essay)

Writer: John Armstrong

In the last two years’ rush for all things Balkan and musical, Frankfurt-based DJ Shantel’s Bucovina Club project is probably the most prominent and effective portrayal of the wildness and sheer ecstasy of traditional-modernised Gypsy party music. Bucovina, once part of the mighty Habsburg Empire but now partly in Romania and partly Ukraine, has been a hotbed of gypsy artistic creativity for centuries. Today, its influences can be felt in the Roma brass bands like the Boban Marcovic Orkestar, Macedonia’s Kocani Orkestar, Sicily’s funeral procession orchestras, and Romania’s famous fiddle/accordion/cimbalom kings, Taraf de Haidouks. Shantel took the name Bucovina for an occasional club night in Frankfurt, which has slowly grown into a Europe-wide phenomenon.

Second albums are traditionally ‘difficult’: but existing Bucovina fans will be relieved to learn that Volume 2 is pretty much like Volume 1, reintroducing us to our old friends Goran Bregovic and Fanfare Ciocarlia, remixing a leading new-wave gypsy orchestra (Sandy Lopicic), revisiting the classic Algerian song about the the pains of the emigrant’s way of life – Ya Rayah - but in a Roma style; and building on the North African / East European musical affinities with the Mahala Rai Banda’s Mahalageasca.

The Bucovina Club’s own Orkestar give us the klezmer-flavoured wedding song Ciganka (check Vesna Petkovic’s atmospheric vocals); there’s a crazy-but-it-works moment when DJ/ remixers Haaksman & Haaksman recast Trinidad veteran calypsonian Houdini’s music in a Roma mold. And as if all that weren’t enough, we have a track from the beautiful Rona Hartner, co-star of French gypsy film director Tony Gatlif’s 1998 classic Roma movie Gadjo Dilo (and that’s a soundtrack you should also have in your collection if you can still find it).

Shantel himself keeps his electro background in check, using it judiciously to give the already-powerful dance tracks more of a club-friendly boost – but never spoiling the music, which is frankly too strong to be adversely affected by modern studio jiggery-pokery, in any event. If you’re new to all this, and want to know why gypsybeat fanatic Johnny Depp called his own wedding-party band Taraf de Haidouks ‘the best dance band in the world, ever, in any style’, then this disc is your ideal introduction.

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Buy Shantel / Bucovina Club Volume 2 at Amazon UK (CD) / US (CD)




PUBLISHED: 23 August 2005

RELEASE DATE: 11 July 2005 (UK) / 21 June 2005 (US) .

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