Maja Osojnik Band – ČRNE VODE (black waters/schwarze wasser) / CD BOOK
slovenian folks songs in new urban clothes, slovenian poets, my songs: melancholic, critical, experimental and unpredictable
label: viennese soulfood records (may 2010)
this album was under TOP 10 best jazz albums of the year in austrian magazine FALTER and was nominated as the best album of the year on the radio student, slovenia.

“This Vienna is one big fat cremeschnitte,” I thought when I first visited the city as a tourist. To a girl from a small town in Slovenia, everything was so big, so old, so lovely, so truly classy, oh so refined. The mighty architecture, the humongous monuments, the rosy pink Café Aida…. At every corner, kind and merry “Mozarts” would sell you tickets to classical concerts. Oh, the elegant boutiques and restaurants everywhere you looked, and everywhere else, oh, the manicured parks gracing a city! Meanwhile, behind this amazing set erected for the tourists, waiting in the wings, was an even more interesting city. A pulsating city of contradictions: contradictions political, social, and cultural. A city in which everything works fine and, at the same time, nothing does, really. A city which lovingly looks after its cultural heritage, while at the same time it works at repressing its very own memories. A city of splendour, yes, and of squalor. A city always in motion. People are constantly arriving and departing. Every few years, you pack your bags and, if this time you don’t leave the city, you at least move to another neighbourhood, which has its own, entirely new rhythm. It is a city with all manner of cultural and musical ghettos, which here and there, now and again, nevertheless actually touch, embrace, and, yes, even coalesce. All these different ways of enjoying life—these cultures, subcultures, and the sites at which they collide—became the inspiration for my work and then this project.
Where trade flourishes and culture blooms, there you always find people of many nationalities contributing to the barter. This marketplace of stuff and art makes life colourful, gives it flair. But where there are so many languages, there you also find prejudice. We’re supposed to be living in a society opening to the whole world. Yet, instead of enjoying the melodies and rhythms of a foreign language, people fear and reject the exotic. One language is thought of as the beautiful medium of love and the erotic, while the other is just the language of car thieves and cleaning ladies. Well, I go on believing that we can only profit from conversation and wide-eyed curiosity. With the present project, I want to lavish attention on all the unknown and foreign that so immeasurably enriches our Vienna. And so I have dedicated each of these fourteen songs to different people who have inspired me, who have affected my life in Vienna so much. They are people whose life journey delivered them here, for whom Vienna is a new home, which sometimes is cold, distrustful, and unwelcoming, but most of the time is warm, and wonderful, and kind.
ČRNE VODE is a collection of Slovenian folk songs and songs by various poets, plus songs of my own. The contents are people’s stories. Life stories: of chance, fate, happiness, unhappiness, of lucky accidents, of paths that occasionally cross and then even unite; they speak inescapably of death and of love. Here is a dark lake, full of the hidden, lost, or rejected; you fish around in it until you touch some thing; when you bring it to the surface, you hear a new story. The CD not only brings together many composers and musicians, it also moves among musical genres. Thus it encourages the curious listener to here and there hear, to listen in on, something new. For us musicians and composers, what fun it was to flit from one component to the next.
A year ago, I was visiting Eva and Jochen in Studio 3007 and saw the posters they were just then designing for rhiz. They were wonderful! The graphic compositions played with the thought of impermanence, with life and death. How frail and fragile, how at the same time monstrous and mighty the magnified insects were! There, that was the theme for the project I had long been carrying around in my thoughts: a picture of impermanence, of frailty and fragility and, at the same time, of solidity and strength. The love of detail, the poetry of living, of remaining, and the poetry of dying, of death. Out of the coming together of our ideas, that harmony, out of the wonderful evenings of conversation, and after hours and hours of work, what was going to be booklet for a CD became a book. So this book, this CD, is not just my project, but belongs as much to Eva and Jochen and the wonderful musicians and translators, all working together. And it belongs to the people the songs are dedicated to, and those who believed in the project and generously supported it—my patrons, its godparents. And now it belongs to you… Take your time.
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