«…We play music at weddings and funerals, or just for the fun of it…»
Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine. Brass section, cymbals, guitar, bass, drums, vocals.
…Besides, you should know, what is Frankivs’k. It is a city only
30 km from Carpathian mountains, on the banks of two mountain rivers, such an island, such a Jamaica… It is good to be born here, and also to wait for death… It is pleasant to drink coffee under the linden, in the coffee-shop with Polish words «Kolonialne Towary» slightly visible under the facade whitewash. Or you can take a couple of vodka bottles, some sausage and some weed and ingest all this on the lawn behind the ancient Polish Catholic church. No one hurries here. From my window at the workplace now I can see the mountains still covered with snow, and the snow will not come off until July, though it will be hot in the city. Those mountains are inhabited by Gutsuly, people who think themselves as not just Ukrainians, but simply Gutsuly. I myself am Gutsul. And Perkalaba is a small settlement (we call it forest logging depot) situated190 km from the city, its population is just 150–200 people. They never hurry at all and all this outer world for them, as we say, just does not matter.
We play music at weddings and funerals, or just for the fun of it. I already told, we played music near the maternity hospital, when our musicians’ children were born, besides Perkalaba played at our tsymbalyst's wedding last autumn (we played our own songs while wedding musicians took repast ― and none of the guests were disappointed). But the point is not whether we played at weddings or not (we are not just wedding musicians) ― Perkalaba’s music carries this wedding spirit in itself. Moreover, once in Kyiv one prominent artist met me and asked if Perkalaba could play music at his funeral. And while we were waiting for casting at the STB TV channel, we had some time, took out the instruments (at the underground railway station Shuljavka) and played for 20 minutes, we earned43 hryvnas, 5 beer bottles and the sack full of apples, donated by some old man from Chernihivschyna. That old man sold apples there, he asked and we agreed to play music on his 60-year jubilee next autumn at his village (he has a rich grandson, he said, who will pay for it, and so it goes — a performance at a rural corporate party). That’s what I want to say ― THERE IS MUCH JOY IN THIS WORLD!Except from the interview with Perkalaba producer Oleg Hnativ
The group «Perkalaba» from Ivano-Frankivs’k were the headliners of the festival. Perkalaba’s performance is a show, that you should absolutely watch live. The records do not reflect even the half of that drive performed on stage. The performance began from coming on stage wearing just shorts and wings (real white feathered wings) and playing a song about the «dutchware monument». At the backstage the three painted sumo fighters made some spasmatic movements. The trumpets blare, the vocalist gives all he has got and the audience is in ecstatic trance…
Official site: www.perkalaba.com.uaPerkalaba is a group from Western Ukraine, that plays Gutsul ethno-ska-music. The group was born in 1998 in Ivano-Frankivs’k. At that time the musicians played ska-punk and reggae, but as the time flows by they turned more and more to the traditional Gutsul music. The name Perkalaba comes from one small Gutsul village in Carpathians, that symbolizes for the musicians their personal Zion.