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In a recent concert on the small Mediterranean island of Menorca, the Spanish musician Anna Ferrer stood behind a synthesizer and struck up a sumptuous, buzzing drone. Wreathed in smoke and backlit by a single beam of light, she sang a melancholy melody that could make you feel like you’re falling backward through the centuries. In some sense, that’s exactly what those of us seated in the 19th-century opera house were doing.
Her repertoire that night was drawn mostly from Menorcan folk music—songs of harvest, love, and hardship, songs that the island’s inhabitants have been singing for generations. Titled Parenòstic, a regional term for a farmers’ almanac, the performance conjured vivid images with little more than voice, synth, and ukulele. The stark set took sounds from the past—including, at one point, a distorted loop of an old woman singing that sounded like it came from a weatherbeaten vinyl disc—and made them feel eerily contemporary, collapsing centuries of humanity into spine-tingling harmonies.
For her finale, Ferrer sang an emotional a cappella version of “Cecilia,” a heartbreaking tale of a dying bride. By chance, that song also turns up in the repertoire of Tarta Relena, a Catalan duo responsible for two groundbreaking albums of experimental folk music in the past year: Pack Pro Nobis and Fiat Lux. Hybridity is at the heart of Tarta Relena’s approach: The duo of Helena Ros and Marta Torrella adapts songs from across Spain and around the Mediterranean, and their material includes flamenco standards, Corsican polyphony, and even the eerie modal harmonies of the Caucasian nation of Georgia. (You might recognize the latter style from Kate Bush’s 1985 song “Hello Earth,” from Hounds of Love, which includes snippets of the Georgian folk song “Tsintskaro.”)
Yet Tarta Relena’s approach is decidedly contemporary. Pack Pro Nobis includes leftfield dance remixes from John Talabot and MANS O, while subtle electronic pulses and rippling effects run through Fiat Lux. Onstage, the two musicians flesh out their singing by playing percussive patterns on a ceramic amphora outfitted with a contact mic—a nifty blend of technologies both modern and ancient.
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It’s not just folk music: Zoom out, and it becomes clear that a number of centuries-old styles are seeping into experimental electronic music as of late. The Mexican-American musician Debit, aka Delia Beatriz, utilized pipes and flutes to create her new album The Long Count: Aided by machine learning, she created digital instruments modeled after ancient Mayan wind instruments held in the collection of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. By turns bleak and otherworldly, her album feels like an attempt to grapple with the fundamental unknowability of the distant past, even as it seeks to forge a spiritual connection that transcends contemporary methods of timekeeping—the album’s title is a reference to the Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar, a cyclical calendar charting the creation and destruction of the universe.
Debit’s remarkable and at times unsettling album is a reminder that folk music isn’t merely a style; it is a means of making sense of the world and forging connections with others, in both celebration and mourning. And in harnessing unfamiliar instruments to ask questions about tradition, heritage, and post-colonial forgetting, her music suggests that certain sounds may unlock emotions we can’t readily decipher, placing us in a lineage far vaster than we might have imagined.
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Polish composer Wojciech Rusin’s spellbinding Syphon, newly released on cutting-edge electronic label AD 93, taps into digitally processed reeds, 3D printed instruments, and a cappella singing for what he describes as a “speculative” approach to medieval and renaissance traditions, performed in an imagined future in which the past is recalled only in fragments. In the opening “Speculum Veritatis”—an invocation of the Mirror of Truth, a 17th century alchemical symbol—Wojciech seems to be enacting his own kind of musical alchemy: Featured vocalist Eden Girma’s mournful singing recalls the poise of early-music choirs like the Hilliard Ensemble or Gothic Voices. But as the song develops, ominous synthesizers rise from below, and Girma’s voice turns dissonant and guttural against rippling percussion. Similar transformations take place across the stretch of the album, as sheets of digital noise alternate with baroque harpsichord, nature recordings, and processed bagpipes.
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In some cases, “folk” is a feeling. There’s a distinctly timeworn air to the Polish composer Piotr Kurek’s new album World Speaks. Inspired by the Hudson River School painter Thomas Cole, whose 19th century landscapes were imbued with classical and Biblical symbolism, Kurek layers reeds, organ, and voice—or samples of these acoustic sources, anyway—into surreal, moiré-like patterns. There’s a hint of Georgian polyphony to the baritone hum of the opening “Chordists,” while the tentative pipes of “Montufar” evoke medieval folk dances under the influence of magic mushrooms and strong mead. It feels like a time machine that is hurtling forward and backward at once.
Ancient agonies also resonate in Community of Grieving, a sorrowful composition by the Polish sound artist Zosia Hołubowska and Stockholm composer Julia Giertz, in which harrowing vocal harmonies and otherworldly ululations dissolve into thick sheets of digitally treated drones, techno rhythms, and ASMR-inspired breathing. They wrote the 24-minute piece for the the online-only 2020 edition of Krakow’s Unsound Festival, when the pandemic’s brutal first wave was sowing fear and confusion around the world. The piece is meant to balance rituals of mourning with the comforts of community—even when that togetherness is purely notional, as it was for so many during COVID’s lockdown phase. Community of Grieving’s thrillingly dissonant vocals remind me of a moment in the 1980s when Eastern European folk music was briefly in vogue—Georgia’s Rustavi Choir put out an album on Nonesuch in 1989, and a 1975 album by les Mystère des Voix Bulgares became a surprise hit when the goth-adjacent 4AD reissued it in 1986—but perhaps an even more germane comparison would be Diamanda Galás’ 1991 album Plague Mass, which envisioned the miseries of the AIDS crisis through an experimental fusion of opera, fado, and gospel.
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A few weeks after seeing Anna Ferrer in concert, I was browsing a local artisan market when I heard a familiar melody wafting across the plaza. “Adéu ma Cecília… Adéu ma Cecília”—it was the same folk song with which Ferrer had so movingly ended her concert, the same one that gives me goosebumps every time I hear it on Tarta Relena’s album. Only this time, it was being sung by a decidedly amateur group of local folk singers, their harmonies rough around the edges. In the plaza, the song was clearly alive, in the way of all truly timeless music—shuttling between avant-garde contexts and popular celebrations, a link to the past that refused to be stuck there.
