Kravchenko Clees

It is a rare combination, a duo of voice and vibraphone. Two melodic “instruments” that play around, circle each other or become one in unison to form a shared sound tool. The voice sings words, speaks, whispers, forms sounds, breaks the melody, fragments it into sharp-edged splinters that shatter between the clattered chords of the vibraphone and form new shapes in the music. Sparkling, seductive, tentative, questioning.

The words stand alone like monuments to a distant memory or swirl like a shower of syllables. They come from poems selected by Ukrainian singer and vocalist Kateryna Kravchenko together with Luxembourg vibraphonist Arthur Clees. As intimate descriptions of longing and memory, of great beauty and pain.

Kravchenko and Clees met at the Dresden University of Music shortly after the beginning of the russian full-scale invasion in Ukraine. Working on the composition project entitled “War or the Absence of Peace” at the Military History Museum in Dresden, they examined how, in retrospect, art and especially music and literature, has repeatedly given the oppressed the strength to rebel and not give up. As in traditional folk songs that became revolutionary songs. Like in the poems of Ukrainian poet and dissident Vasyl Stus, who rebelled against Soviet oppression of Ukrainian culture and language and was deported to a Siberian gulag where he had to suffer brutal and inhumane camp conditions.

Kravchenko and Clees delve deeply into the word images of the poems and translate them into a tonal poetics in which improvisation flows together with the fine ramifications of the jointly formed material. The compositions develop during the interplay as a collage of material that is supplemented, shaped or discarded. Composed without notation and “by ear.”

© Maxi Broecking (Journalist / Author)