Balkan Express

From his base in Tel Aviv, Gili Yalo is launching a solo career in a new project that combines Ethiopian roots with soul, funk, psychedelic, and jazz music. Yalo, who has collaborated with top music producers Beno Hendler (Balkan Beat Box) and Uri Brauner Kinrot (Boom Pam), incorporates sounds from traditional Ethiopian music into a contemporary music production.

Darko Nikčević and Srdjan Bulatović, the internationally renowned guitar duo from Montenegro, are acclaimed for their virtuosity and for exciting performances that blend influences from the Mediterranean and the Middle East. This programme captures the spontaneous nature of their musical creativity and documents the strange period in which the world first stood still under the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing on a shared Balkan heritage and using eloquently transparent melodies, these pieces express uncertainty and isolation as well as the deepest and most beautiful of emotions, from inner peace and contentment to a cheerful appreciation of life itself.

The title of the new album says it all: Opus, the new release of Danish music project Afenginn, has indeed become a major work, consisting of four movements - just like a classical symphony. Within those pieces, an unusual world of sounds unfolds, largely unspoilt by traditional patterns and structures. Influenced by folk, world music and classical music, Afenginn have created their own individual style, acoustic, innovative, dynamic and doleful, which has brought them a wealth of awards and grants in their home country as well as worldwide appreciation and success. Afenginn was founded in 2002 in Copenhagen by musicology student Kim Rafael Nyberg from Finland and Rune Kofoed from Denmark.