2024 Favourites – The Best Music from Central and Eastern Europe
The best Central & Eastern European albums, EPs and reissues of 2024.
Welcome back to Táto Strana Európy, a newsletter about music from Central and Eastern Europe. Despite our prolonged silence, we’ve been listening and are happy to share with you our favourite music from Central and Eastern Europe from 2024. We hope you’ll find some inspiring music, and urge you to support these amazing artists directly. —Adam Badí Donoval
2024 Favourites
Adaa Zagorodnya – Charlatan / Bye and Bye I'm Goin' to See the King [s/r]
Adaa Zagorodnya’s pair of self-released albums from 2024 are beautifully constructed sample-based collections – tender, melodic, yet also beautifully jagged. They remind me of yyu/Ulla’s music in the sense that time seems to pass differently within this music; at one moment it moves quickly, with urgency, at the next it slows down, as if you’re moving through time in slow motion, the air becoming syrupy, the sounds bending in this new unreality. Stunningly imaginative and strange. – Adam Badí Donoval
Ankramu – Krása [Rieka]
From Q1:
“I don’t recall a band from Slovakia ever reminding me of Talk Talk, but Ankramu have done it. The trio’s third album Krása (“Beauty”) is a personal early contender for AOTY with its sparse, measured instrumentation, its loose yet groovy songwriting, its lyrics balanced perfectly between poetic imagery and clever turns of phrase. “Majstre, dotkli ste sa mojej ruky” and “Tie kvety, tie sú len naoko” are incredible ear-worms, the former a hopeful meditation on the cyclical nature of life, the latter a dreamy ode to freedom. Perfectly executed art-rock. – Adam Badí Donoval”
Antonina Nowacka – Sylphine Soporifera [Mondoj]
From our interview with Antonina Nowacka by Julia Pátá
“Nowacka’s solo music is an imagined map of her journeys, which physically exist in their outlines, but their final otherworldly form is shaped by her unique toolkit. This also applies to her third solo album Sylphine Soporifera (2024, Mondoj), whose title refers to the fantastical aerial spirits ‘sylphs’ and the phase of deep sleep called ‘sopor’. It mostly encapsulates the ecstatic experiences from her stay in the deserts of the Peruvian peninsula Paracas, moulding them into a meditative narrative story. She tells this story using her repetitive opera-like vocals surrounded by quirky synths and the new-age-tinged instrumental accompaniment of Italian ocarinas, Mexican zither, and Nepalese flutes, all encountered on her travels. Together, these elements construct the majestic, yet timeless and flowing sonic landscape. – Julia Pátá”
Cukor Bila Smert’ – Recordings 1990—1993 [Shukai]
From Q1:
“This extensive reissue of Ukrainian psych-folk band Cukor Bila Smert’s studio recordings made between 1990 and 1993 sheds light on one of the inventive side-projects of artist Svitlana Nianio. An hour-and-a-half-long anthology which mainly covers the works of Nianio and guitarist Eugene Taran, occasionally joined by Oleksand Kohanovskyi and Tamila Mazur. It captures a unique blend of frenetic art-rock, folk-tinged psychedelia enhanced by odd, grotesque lyricism and Nianio's ghastly, high-pitched soprano. A time capsule dug from the depths of the Eastern European underground, it seems hard to grasp in its incredible scope. – Julia Pátá”
GbClifford – My heart is bigger than the grief inside of it [Pocahontas]
The perfectly captured Zeitgeist. Noise, pop, alternative rock, post-electronics etc. create a sound collage which encompasses personal sadness, worries, insecurities, the short-term and painfully transient (and, at the end of the day that much more masochistic) option of escape. This is the age which we are creating and living. – Michael Papcun
HMOT – There Will Come Gentle Rain [Warm Winters Ltd.]
An intimate, but that much more surprisingly epic album. Epic in the sense that through it you travel far, all the way to the periphery. Electronics and folkloric influences together create a dense and highly imaginative sound fog. Walking with your eyes closed is rarely as captivating as when you listen to HMOT. – Michael Papcun
Irena & Vojtěch Havlovi – Four Hands [Animal Music]
The sudden, unexpected passing of dear Vojtěch Havel was one of the biggest musical losses of last year for our region. This beautiful album of pieces for four hands (several for piano, several for organ and several for both instruments) by Irena and Vojtěch is a reminder of the tenderness, grace, elegance and simplicity that permeates everything they did together – within and outside of music. It’s perhaps one final document of their intimate collaboration, the movement of their four hands as if stemming from one mind, one soul. – Adam Badí Donoval
Manja Ristić & Tomáš Šenkyřík – Vstal [Skupina]
This collaborative album by Serbian violinist and sound artist Manja Ristić and Czech composer and musicologist Tomáš Šenkyřík resembles something of a virtual time capsule. Conveying the still vivid memories of the artists' homelands, the field recordings of the sea waves strike with their heftiness and the woodlands are dense with the river flow and birds chirping. But "this is not your forest," reminds us wistfully the lyric in the track Čudna šuma. The audible idyl comes up with the echo of something fatal obscured. – Julia Pátá
Michaela Turcerová – alene et [mappa]
The playful appeal of Michaela Turcerová's alene et, which could easily work as sound design for a surrealist animated film, lies in its exposed physicality - of both the instruments and the performer. On her solo debut, the Denmark-based Slovakian musician digs through the inertia of the modulated saxophone, found objects and a variety of toys. Turcerová examines their percussive traits with childlike rudimentary eagerness. Moreover, there is an erratic sense of humor, which alters the release in unexpected ways. – Julia Pátá
Piotr Kurek – The night we slept under an overhanging cliff [Longform Editions]
Read our interview with Piotr Kurek by Adam Badí Donoval
Piotr Kurek’s latest solo offering for Longform Editions is characteristically uncanny; harp, saxophone, clarinet, double bass, voices and guitar intertwine to create a sort of dreamworld where things aren’t as they seem. Playful, but also mysterious and slightly off-kilter, the piece is a fascinating despite its shorter duration. Sampled and resampled instruments and textures mimic one another, answer each other’s calls or overlap in imaginative ways. Nobody makes music like Piotr Kurek right now. – Adam Badí Donoval
SSRI – SSRI [Pointless Geometry]
The psych-dub on SSRI’s self-titled album evolves from the bottom of the dark and gloomy depths, from which the heated tropical sounds unhurriedly emerge and dissolve in the vast, droney soundscape. This record is a panopticon of the imagined sunbathed land, where the exotic and urban clashes, and the heat leads to phantasmagoria. Density rises on the top of the monotonous, hypnagogic beat. One of the projects from the Łódź-based Pointless Geometry label roster that should stay on your radar. - Julia Pátá
Staś Czekalski – Przygody [Mondoj]
From Q1:
“The setting of Staś Czekalski's flowing ambient debut Przygody resembles an RPG game with Warsaw's map as the playground. Inspired by the Polish composer's wanderings around the capital, the album released on the Polish key experimental label Mondoj is imbued with a childlike skill to perceive the most obscured. Czekalski traces the sunbeams inching through hidden urban nooks with the gentle strokes of MIDI guitars, sparse tones of cheap synths, cordial marimbas, or woozy vocals. Airy, sweet, and yet not naive, the ten short compositions are like thawing ice cream on a late summer day.” - Julia Pátá
Štefan Szabó – clouds and pulses [Ma Records]
Štefan Szabó’s clouds and pulses is a work documenting two compositional approaches, which stem from two churches where the recordings were made and their organs’ mechanical properties. The alternating pieces called either “clouds” (sustained) and “pulses” (quivering, due to bellows present in the organ) make this an organ album which is quite unusual. These pieces are documents of the environments of the church, as well as solemn, reverent compositions which nod to the cultural and religious significance they hold in the regions of Southern Slovakia where they were recorded. – Adam Badí Donoval
Trabant – Trabant [purge.xxx]
This first definite release by underground Hungarian collective Trabant (active since ~1980) is a treasure trove of never-before-heard music from a group of “amateur” musicians who recorded “a significant body of work with rudimentary recording equipment and instruments (much of which was purchased in a toy store), always behind closed doors.” The mood here is somewhat whimsical (a strange clash of pop reggae and new wave), but also deeply melancholic and – unsurprisingly, as Mihály Víg is a member of Trabant – reminiscent of the atmospheres of Béla Tárr’s films. Essential listening. – Adam Badí Donoval
Various Artists – Even the Forest Hums: Ukrainian Sonic Archives 1971-1996 [Light In The Attic]
This beautiful compilation showcases the breadth of the Ukrainian underground and its vitality in the 25-year period between 1971 and 1996, as it faced many challenges including imperial oppression, Stalinist famine, war, or criminalizing expressions of Ukrainian language, faith, and music, among others. Co-curated by Shukai and Light In The Attic, it’s a highly (re)listenable compilation, with personal highlights from Vodohrai, Iury Lech, Valentina Goncharova, or Ihor Tsymbrovsky. – Adam Badí Donoval
Zaumne – Only Good Dreams For Me [Warm Winters Ltd.]
Faded voices are trying to break through a thick wall of dense sound textures, in which glimpses of trip-hop-y melodies liquefy in soft reverberations. In Polish sound artist Mateusz Olszewski aka Zaumne's new offering fantasies are more tangible than reality. The underlying repetitive motifs coalesce with the flowing shreds of one-standing notes, slipping beats, samples of stretched-out cries, the uncanny clarity of Natalia Panzner's singing on “Love2”, and moments of distortion. It's a lucid dream, with the unnamed shadows lurking from around the melting corner. – Julia Pátá
Honourable mentions
Alëna Korolëva – premonitions [forms of minutiae]
Alley Catss – m Helux [mappa]
Barbora Hora – forgotten garden, wild growth (part one) [s/r]
Bolka – žiadzasamy [weltschmerzen]
EYIBRA – OFFSPRING [Standard Deviation]
FOQL – The Metamorphosis [s/r]
Gary Gwadera – Far, far in Chicago. Footberk Suite [Pointless Geometry]
Havelka / Havel – Vanishing Mountain [Stoned To Death]
HMOT – The Moon Turned Into The Sun [Kota Tones / Beacon Sound]
Hubert Zemler – groove 18 [outlines]
Jana Kirschner – Obyčajnosti [Slnko Records]
Katov Syn(th) – Tu, kde žijem, žiješ, žijeme [LOM]
mezi patry klid – mezi patry klid [s/r]
Michaela Antalová & Adrian Myhr – Sing Nightingale [mappa]
mu tate – wanting less [Warm Winters Ltd.]
Nikolaienko – Meta [Muscut]
Olga Anna Markowska – Thrills [Kanu Kanu]
Päfgens – Aspect Of What [mappa]
Raphael Rogiński – Žaltys [Unsound]
sorbitol drops – Remízek Music [Gin & Platonic]
Tante Elze – Ódy [Slnko Records]
Urn – Self Sabotage [Stoned To Death]
VA – 4ever [Pocahontas]
VA – Prah [Warm Winters Ltd.]
Vojdi – Kompost [s/r]
wh0wh0 – groove 16 [outlines]
Thank you for reading! :~)
love reading and listening to your recommendations Adam!! Great work!