Description
“Lemko Echoes” is not an attempt to recreate the music of the past. It is a meeting of tradition and the present — bringing Lemko melodies into dialogue with jazz, improvisation, electronics, classical music and indie pop.
Kari Sál draws on songs preserved, among other sources, in the collections of Oskar Kolberg, while placing them alongside her own compositions. The result is music that does not imitate folklore, but allows tradition to live anew.
At the heart of the album is the idea of home — understood not as an address, but as memory, voice and a sense of belonging.
Kari Sál was born in the Bieszczady Mountains, where her family had lived for many generations. As a result of Operation “Vistula”, her family was forcibly resettled to the Szczecin region. As soon as circumstances allowed, however, they returned to the Bieszczady Mountains. It was there that they built a home in which singing and making music together were part of everyday life, and where music helped shape a sense of identity and community.
This is why “Lemko Echoes” is more than an album inspired by folk music. It is an artistic return to the source. Songs that for decades have carried stories of love, childhood, displacement and longing meet the language of contemporary jazz.
The musical narrative moves from traditional song through contemporary songwriting to passages of improvisation, while Kari Sál’s voice becomes one of the most important instruments in this story.
“The home I still long for…” — these words open Marta Kula’s liner notes and offer a key to understanding the entire album. As Kula writes, Kari Sál “symbolically returns home,” guided by the Lemko melodies she grew up with.
One of the particular strengths of “Lemko Echoes” is its sound. Rather than choosing an obvious folk stylisation, the ensemble embraces what Marta Kula describes as “conscious syncretism.”
As a result, the traditional melodies never sound like artefacts preserved in an archive. They are raw and contemporary, at times intimate and at others extraordinarily expressive. An important role is played by Adam Bałdych’s violin, whose musical language, according to Kula, “forms a bridge between the worlds of tradition and jazz.”
This is also an album about the voice. In Lemko culture, singing was one of the most natural ways of expressing emotion and building community. Kari explores the full range of her vocal expression — from traditional open-throat singing and melorecitation to improvisation. Marta Kula emphasises that the artist “leads the ensemble with confidence and power in her voice.”
“Lemko Echoes” also marks another stage in Kari Sál’s artistic journey. Inspirations drawn from Lemko culture and the Lemko region have appeared in her work before, but, as Marta Kula observes, “for the first time, Kari reaches so boldly into her roots.” In Kula’s words, the album is “music full of naturalness and maturity, without taking shortcuts in its arrangements.”
tracklist & samples
“Kari Sál’s music is full of naturalness and maturity, with no shortcuts taken in the arrangements.”
— Marta Kula / Radio 357
