foltin...

check out THIS BAND from Macedonia...
i first became addicted to the music of the former Yougoslavia when i saw Emir Kusturica's TIME OF THE GYPSIES around 1990. i think it came out in Europe exactly when i moved from Brussels to Quito, so i missed it & upon my first visit back to Brussels everyone was still raving about the movie. it wasn't in theaters anymore & not out on video (or dvd...wait, did we have dvds yet back then??? can't remember!). anyhew, i was so frustrated to have to wait longer than everyone else to see it, but it was well worth the wait!!!
a few years later in Caracas, alone in the desolate art house theater of a rundown mall squeezed between the shadows of sky scrapers, with faulty air conditioning & a big noisy fan at the back of the screening room, i saw Emir Kusturica's UNDERGROUND. to this day it is one of my all time favorite movies. full of soul, spirit, emotion & all the raw experiences; it sums up life really well, if you have the patience for a 3 hour long tragedy/comedy movie with subtitles. that time in Caracas, the subtitles were in Spanish only. by then i had lived in South America long enough to be fluent in Spanish but i wasn't used to sit through such a long movie having to read Spanish subtitles, so i missed some of the translation. i was mesmerized nonetheless:

Emir Kusturica's film composer is famous musician Goran Bregovic; his most famous piece must be this one called EDERLEZI. hmmm, funny how many years later i find myself representing the best music/sound shop in the bizz Q DEPARTMENT, whose founder hails from the former Yougoslavia... Q Dept. recently covered music & sound design on the following 2 shorts:
- she walked calmly disappearing into the darkness
- and she stares longingly at what she has lost