Elina Duni
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Elina Duni voice, piano, guitar, percussion
Recorded July 2017, Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines
Engineers: Gérard de Haro and Nicolas Baillard (mastering)
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: April 27, 2018

We are all departing, bound to be torn away,
one day or another, from what we love.
Here are scenes of departure sung in nine languages.
All we are left with is the unknown ahead of us.

So does Elina Duni describe this intimate new collection of songs. As on her previous outings for ECM, if by different register in being alone, the Albanian singer grabs hold of her roots and squeezes them until tears of personal significance drip into the vessels of her guitar, piano, frame drum, and voice itself.

Domenico Modugno’s “Amara Terra Mia” (Bitter Land of Mine) opens as many doors as the song has words. It’s a film reduced to a single camera and actor, a memory that finds its protagonist severing the umbilical cord of her ancestral home in favor of itineracy. But while there’s as much to be gained as lost from this endeavor, the uncertainty of it all looms over her like a cloud of darkness, her only companion the guitar that gives her a ground upon which to place her vocal step.

On the surface of this and all songs to follow there is a fracture, from which issues a ribbon of nostalgic patterns and color schemes, but which in its unraveling signals an end to things. Such mortality is felt with deep urgency in Alain Oulman’s “Meu Amor” (My Love) and Duni’s own “Let Us Dive In.” In the latter, she holds the piano close to her chest, as if to transfer some of her heartbeat to its material assemblage in the hopes of illuminating something common to both. In the fleshly conflict of Muhammad Abd al Rahim al Masloub’s “Lamma Bada Yatathanna” (When He Was Swaying) and solace-seeking litany of Jacques Brel’s “Je Ne Sais Pas” (I Don’t Know), she dismantles façades of expectation to expose the shadows slumbering behind them. With these she dances in defiance of human contact.

The album’s most resonant chambers house its traditional selections, intersecting with cultural touch-points in Kosovo, Armenia, Macedonia, and Albania. From the separation anxieties of “Vishnja” (The Cherry Tree) and “Lusnak Gisher” (Moonlit Night), both of which share metaphorical affinity with Philip Laskowsky’s “Oyfn Veg” (On the Road), to the dolorous strains of “Vaj Si Kenka” (How) and fleet images of “Schönster Abestärn” (Beautiful Evening Star), Duni broadens her wingspan to ensure total protection when night falls. But few beats of those feathers are as powerful as those sung without accompaniment in “Kanga e Kurbetit” (The Exile Song). Therein, her illustration of exile is itself a form of exile, dividing the self into as many components as possible before putting them together anew, minus the broken pieces.