Rousilvo

Macedonian composer / multi-instrumentalist Dine Doneff (or Kostas Theodorou, his Greek citizenship name) presents his Balkan-jazz-folk-opera Rousilvo and the first release on neRED music in cooperation with ECM Records.

Heavily influenced by the culture of his homeland, Doneff creates a musical fabric through open dialogue among the members of a septet. A polyphony of seven women’s voices, interspersed with extracts from numerous authentic field recordings, complete a narration of expanding rhythmic and melodic forms.

Rousilvo is the old, Slavic name of the village of Xanthogeia, in north-western Greece. The village’s name, and its Slav-Macedonian speaking community, fell victim to the policy of the Greek state to forcibly “Hellenize” the land and its people. At the end of the Greek Civil War (1946-49) most of the women in the village were left alone for the rest of their lives; their husbands either killed or exiled. Since 1986 the village has been uninhabited as a result of long-lasting social marginalization.

Ten compositions, alternating with location recordings of the surviving elderly residents of the village (sometimes singing, at times narrating their stories) salvaging and transforming a treasure trove, an elegy, of a vanishing poetry.