Mariana Sadovska tells us about the pain of the departing emigrant, she sings about the blooming spring and evokes the collective carnivalesque carpathian-bacchanal:
“Most expressive: an astonishing mélange of archaic elements, vocal arts, hard rock and theatrical-ironic refractions“
(Werner Fuhr / WDR3)

For ten years Mariana has been travelling through the neighbourhood of rural Ukraine collecting songs, legends, rimes from the women living there – popular material hundreds of years old that only outlived the soviet era by oral tradition and which, nowadays, is mostly unknown even among Ukrainians. Her repertoire embraces pagan midsummer night invocations, old-fashioned wedding songs, melancholic emigrant chants… and the aim is always to tell a story: about live, about adventure, about sorrow and love.

Together with her band Borderland, Mariana works on this old popular material, transforming it into singular contemporary sound using rhythms of improvised music and avantgarde harmonies. Thus, Mariana revives the archaic tunes with her expressive voice, ranging from susurrant tremolo over angered sprechgesang up to anything beyond ordinary sound. The result of her singing is a peculiar soundtrack that talks about universal wisdom and deep human feelings.