Dine Doneff

Dine Doneff: Nostos

| Tyran Grillo

Dine Doneff double bass, percussion, lute, classical guitar, tambura, voice
Takis Farazis piano, accordion, voice
Sokratis Sinopoulos lyra
Dimos Dimitriadis flute, saxophone
Dany Hayes trumpet
Melina Kana voice
Maria Thoidou voice
Takis Kanelos drums
Manos Achalinotopoulos clarinet
Dimitris Chalkias clarinet
Dimitris Christidis trumpet
Nikos Kollias Tantsis trombone
Pantelis Benetatos piano
Nikos Sidirokastritis drums
Michalis Siganidis double bass
Recording Engineer: Yannis Tsambazis
Polytropon Studio, Thessaloniki – November 1995
Dany Hayes was recorded in Silverbold Studios, New York (1996)
Work Arranger: Dine Doneff
Cover: Fotini Potamia
Mastering: Chris Hadjistamou, Athens Mastering
First release by LYRA (Athens) June 1999
Producer: Dine Doneff

Nostos marks the opening chapter in a trilogy that has since come to define the mature voice of multi-instrumentalist and composer Dine Doneff. First released in 1999 on the Athens-based LYRA label and later rehomed by Doneff’s own neRED imprint, it is a recording that reveals more of itself with each return. Its thematic concerns, tonal palette, and ethical orientation radiate forward through Rousilvo and culminate in Doudoule. In hindsight, this debut installment feels less like a preface than a generative source.

Its title announces the central concept of return, understood not simply as physical homecoming but as a confrontation with memory, loss, and belonging. Doneff shapes this idea across two broad arcs spanning nine pieces, tracing a passage from encounter to separation and from outward motion toward interior reckoning. In doing so, the recording situates itself within the continuum of world music not as a stylistic mosaic but as a lived conversation, where Balkan, Eastern Mediterranean, jazz, and modal traditions coexist without hierarchy or pastiche.

The opening sequence begins with a spare invocation. A solitary lute establishes an atmosphere of distance and ancestry, carrying a gravity that binds the personal to the collective. From this threshold emerges an intimate convergence of timbres rather than a declarative statement. Doneff’s percussion entwines with the lyra of Sokratis Sinopoulos, while Takis Farazis’s piano follows a parallel route, at times aligning, at times drifting away. Melina Kana’s wordless vocal presence introduces warmth without tethering expression to language. What surfaces here is not certainty, but a shared willingness to move together even as divergence remains inevitable.

As the record broadens, its physical presence becomes more pronounced. Rhythms drawn from tabla and hand percussion root the sound in bodily motion, while winds and brass stretch the frame outward. The flute of Dimos Dimitriadis and the trumpet of Dany Hayes sweep across a textured accordion field shaped by Farazis, until abstraction gives way to something tactile and immediate. The audible stamp of Doneff’s boots on the studio floor, joined by voices and clapping, anchors the performance in lived space. This is tradition not preserved in frame, but reanimated through breath, movement, and communal energy.

That sense of shared experience crests in the dance-centered passages. Supported by Doneff alongside drummer Takis Kanelos, a gathering of horns and reeds conjures a celebration that feels simultaneously rooted and unbounded. Dimitriadis on saxophone and Manos Achalinotopoulos on clarinet take spirited turns as extensions of a collective pulse.

As expected, the trajectory turns toward parting. The midpoint recognizes separation as a necessary counterbalance to union. When the latter half of the program begins, attention shifts inward. With Nikos Sidirokastritis on drums and Doneff on bass, restraint and equilibrium come to the fore, favoring coexistence over confrontation. The ensuing voyage unfolds with patience, introduced by a fragile, minor-key piano figure. Brass and saxophone gain strength through persistence rather than force, their lines etched like accumulated experience into the terrain. Farazis’s solo, supported by Sidirokastritis’s tactile rhythmic foundation, arrives with a sense of earned reflection.

The closing stretch resists easy resolution. Interlaced basses, voice, piano, and accordion form a slow, shadowed progression that edges toward closure even as it slips away. Maria Thoidou’s vocal presence hovers between lament and affirmation, acknowledging that return is never a simple reversal. What follows is an uncertain space where meaning remains unsettled.

The final gesture stands alone, with Farazis at the piano. In a brief span, the closing piece compresses entire lives into touch and resonance. It suggests solitude without despair, remembrance without sentimentality. If Nostos offers a lesson, it is that return does not restore what has vanished, nor does it annul distance traveled. Instead, it proposes a way of carrying lived experience forward.

Within the wider terrain of world music, Nostos already signals Doneff’s refusal to exoticize tradition or flatten difference. His evolution as a composer and performer begins here with an ethic of attention, treating sound as a site of encounter rather than assertion. The recording does not argue for unity as sameness or identity as enclosure. It gestures toward something quieter and more enduring: that belonging is shaped through movement, through departure as much as arrival, and through the humility to return altered. In that sense, Nostos remains deliberately open-ended, continuing to resonate wherever listeners recognize themselves in its unfolding path.

Dine Doneff: Roden Voden (neRED/6)

| Tyran Grillo

Dine Doneff double bass, guitar, mandola, tambura, piano, organ, percussion, and tapes
Kyriakos Gouventas violin on “Flow”
Main corpus of recordings: MK Studio, Munich
Müncher Kammerspiele – December 29, 2018
Engineer: Johann Jürgen Koch
Additional recordings: Vertekop Studio – 2019
Engineer: Pande Noushin
Mixed and edited by Dine Doneff
Domagk Cell 27, Munich – May 2025
Mastering: Christoph Stickel
Cover artwork: Fotini Potamia
Produced by Dine Doneff

We Macedonians
will not live in fear
The time will come,
and we’ll sing
our old song, again.

Those lines run through Roden Voden like roots growing in the earth. They function neither as a slogan nor as a promise easily fulfilled, sounding instead as something learned under pressure, after history has already exacted its toll. In this sense, Dine Doneff’s concluding chapter in a trilogy that began with Nostos in 1995 and continued through Rousilvo in 2004 does not simply present music. It stages a reckoning. The album listens backward into time, gathering voices recorded between 1991 and 2009 in Rousilvo, Ostrovo, Ts’rnessovo, and Voden, Greece, and carries them forward into the present, where memory, erasure, and survival collide.

Macedonia’s modern history is marked by fragmentation, forced silences, renamings, and borders drawn without regard for the lives lived along them. Languages were pressured into retreat. Songs were sung quietly, or only at home, if at all. Roden Voden treats these conditions as active forces shaping every sound. Doneff’s original compositions do not dominate the archival material. They surround it, support it, and sometimes unsettle it, as though the music itself were asking how an inheritance scarred by violence can be carried without being embalmed.

The album opens its first vocal threshold with “Spell,” voiced and written by Vane Indiff (b. 1944). The poem abandons narrative in favor of invocation. Natural forces, measures of time, mythic presences, and ancestral peoples accumulate in a relentless cadence that feels closer to ritual than to verse. Language becomes a circle drawn to awaken a world that has been dispersed. The poem does not describe resurrection. It attempts it, using repetition and breath as tools of release.

Such ritual gravity strengthens with “Zhalaj me Majko,” sung by Slava Pop’va (b. 1927). This folk song unfolds as a quiet lament shaped by exile and unspoken longing. Its melody lilts and never fully settles, searching for reassurance of love in a land that does not recognize her. Addressed to a distant mother, the song carries the weight of a year spent loving in silence. Devotion here is intense but unseen, and by the final lines, it is no longer an emotion but a fatal condition. What remains is a spare, devastating cry that transforms private despair into communal mourning.

“Kirka,” another text by Indiff, fractures time and meaning even further. The poem constructs its logic from color, the everyday, and the body rather than from a story. An almost childlike order is established before being obliterated by the abrupt fact of death as the self is reduced to wood, fire, and branches. Innocence and physicality collide without romanticism. Loss is rendered through disjointed fragments that resist consolation, insisting instead on the rawness of what remains.

Collective tragedy takes center stage in “Dve Tri Poushki,” rendered by Neshka Ts’rnessova (b. 1925). The song distills catastrophe into stark repetition. Rifles are counted. Fallen youths are counted. Grieving mothers are counted. Loss is now the only measure, allowing the song to move from sudden violence toward an enduring lament that binds faith and pain.

The political heart of the album asserts itself most directly in “Censored Memory,” to which Doneff contributes percussion, strings, and a poem in Greek. At the center lies “Oj Lele Brate mi Tane,” a song about Tane Stojchev Kljandzev (1874-1907) from Gornitschevo, leader of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation in Lerin (Florina). Memory here is not merely fragile. It is actively suppressed. By layering languages, voices, and historical reference, the track refuses singular authority and exposes history as something perpetually contested, shaped as much by silence as by speech.

“Nubeti” returns to the terrain of intimate loss. The folk song that follows unfolds as a dialogue between generations. A young widow carries her wedding crown as a relic of happiness interrupted. The mother speaks in the cadence of continuity and social expectation, while the daughter rejects comfort, insisting on the singularity of her grief. Survival and fidelity are placed in quiet opposition, and the song refuses to resolve the tension between them.

“Prikazni” unfolds as a dense, dreamlike collage where landscape, memory, and lament bleed into one another. Mountains, lakes, and weather respond like wounded witnesses to human violence and erasure. Personal cries of love and death interrupt the natural imagery, giving way again to familial grief and village memory. The verses move by emotional association rather than linear sense, capturing a world fractured by loss, where love, labor, war, and dispossession sound together for both the living and the dead.

“Narrative” gathers three texts into a single arc. “Stojna,” voiced by Stojan Gjorgiff (b. 1913), compresses catastrophe into a stark moral tableau where reproach and irreversible action collide in a single breath. Its restraint leaves the listener suspended in an unresolved aftermath. “Stara Panoukla,” sung by T’rpa Tanva Noushna (b. 1905), begins with pastoral tenderness before revealing a plague disguised as an old woman, death entering through the most ordinary gestures. “Dzemo,” sung by Tome Bojn (b. 1929), recounts the revenge killing of Dzhemail Aga, grounding historical violence in personal memory and inherited grievance. Together, these songs demonstrate how folk tradition carries ethics, fear, and justice as lived knowledge.

Threaded between these exhalations are extended wordless spaces where Doneff’s instrumental pieces function as corridors between testimonies. “Flow” opens this terrain with a radiant spread of piano, laying out a landscape where the living and the dead move together. Mandola and tombak provide traction, while a violin lifts memory skyward toward something unforgotten. “Prism” refracts emotion into color, turning sound into touch, a moment of fragile wonder. “Monologue,” an arco double bass solo, is a meditation on loss already named, allowing sorrow to resonate and slowly quiet. “Ghosts of Freedom” lingers with spectral patience, giving shape to implications too heavy for words. “Meglen” serves as connective tissue, bass and percussion sketching a passage rather than a destination. The title track itself emerges from ambient sounds recorded at the cemetery of Rousilvo, dissolving the boundary between presence and absence. “Ni Tvoj Ni Moj,” also rendered via the bow, strips a traditional ballad to its emotional bone. “Pepel” closes the album with classical guitar, light percussion, and the sound of locals speaking bilingually in Macedonian and Greek about atrocities suffered in Edessa Voden during the late 1940s. These unpolished voices do not seek resolution. They exist as ash does, settled, persistent, unavoidable.

Roden Voden matters because it refuses to let history become abstraction. These recordings are not artifacts sealed behind glass. They breathe, falter, contradict, and endure. By interweaving them with contemporary composition, Doneff does not attempt to heal the past. The album suggests that remembrance is not about closure or reclaiming a pure origin. It is about staying with what is difficult, listening without impatience, and recognizing that perseverance often sounds like an unfinished song. In the end, the album does not ask us to remember more clearly but more honestly and to accept that even in fear, even in silence, the old song awaits.

Dine Doneff: Doudoule (neRED/5)

| Tyran Grillo

Tom Arthurs trumpet
Antonis Anissegos piano, prepared piano
Stamatis Pasopoulos bayan
Dine Doneff double bass, guitar, percussion, vocals
Recorded live at Stadtkirche, Rudolstadt
July 6, 2014
Editing: Tome Rapovina
Mastering: Kostas Kontos
Cover/Design: Fotini Potamia
Produced by Dine Doneff

Doudoule begins as a quiet act of assembly, four distinct presences finding one another in real time. Dine Doneff’s bass sets the initial pulse, opening space rather than filling it. Tom Arthurs’ trumpet waits, listening before speaking, attentive to what is already forming around him. Antonis Anissegos approaches from another angle, his piano ready to shift the ground beneath with a single chord or sudden flight. Stamatis Pasopoulos completes the circle with the bayan, an instrument that breathes history and air into the room. Together, they sound less like a band stepping onstage than a conversation already underway, one the listener joins midway, aware that something patient, communal, and deeply human is about to unfold.

“Faces” opens the path. The bass speaks first, soft yet resolute, shaping a malleable mood. It carries light and shade together, suggesting that resolution and doubt are not opposites but companions. Piano chords appear as careful steps across uncertain terrain, each one placed with trust. When the trumpet finally enters, it does so without force, a gradual illumination rather than a flare. The bayan stirs, completing a scene that feels rural and inward, as if fields and sky were meeting inside the music. Nothing fully resolves. The clouds linger at the edges, a reminder of unfinished thoughts and unarticulated concerns. Anissegos’s piano moves between closeness and distance, shifting the listener’s vantage point again and again, teaching us how easily perspective can change without warning.

“Meglen” follows with a different posture. The bass intro here is more angular, almost architectural, yet it breathes freely, allowing swing to bend its lines. From this foundation, a broad and generous theme blooms. The quartet sounds fully assembled now. The trumpet rises with clarity and calm assurance, drawing the listener into a melodic current that feels warming and protective. There is a sense of shelter in this piece, of sound offered as refuge during a cold season. The group’s union becomes palpable, each instrument reinforcing the others without obscuring their character.

The title track moves the goal post once more. It opens playfully, the bass again leading, but this time with a more elastic, inviting tone. Rhythm loosens its grip, allowing the bayan and piano to dance into view. The music becomes communal and animated, buoyed by chant-like vocalizations. There is joy here, but it is grounded rather than ecstatic. Arthurs takes flight above the rhythm, yet never loses contact with what lies below. His trumpet feels like a collective voice lifted skyward. Form and feeling intertwine so closely that they become indistinguishable.

With “Rite of Passage,” the album turns inward. Bass and bayan blend into a more somber hue, their lines tinged with reflection and quiet gravity. A dialogue emerges between bass and trumpet, intimate and exposed, as if the music were speaking directly to its own origins. This exchange reaches toward something essential in Doneff’s musical ethos, a belief in honesty over ornament, in vulnerability as strength. The piece then transforms, slipping into a dreamlike terrain shaped by prepared piano and percussive textures. The familiar dissolves, and what remains is a sense of standing between what has been known and what has yet to take shape.

Last is “Prolet,” where the surreal elements continue to expand before slowly converging. Themes gather as if guided by an unseen gravity, aligning themselves into a closing statement that feels earned rather than imposed. Doneff’s guitar and subtle percussion trace fleeting highlights through the texture, like sunlight catching on distant landscapes glimpsed in sleep. These sounds do not point backward so much as outward, toward places imagined and possibilities still forming.

In its final moments, Doudoule resists the temptation to summarize itself. Instead, it opens a quiet question: How does a shared journey reshape those who walk it together? The music suggests that meaning is found in the very act of listening, in remaining attentive to change and to one another. As the last tones fade, what lingers is awareness, a sense that the path continues beyond the performance, carried forward in memory and in the next act of collective creation.

Dine Doneff: Suite Yedi (neRED/4)

| Tyran Grillo

James Wylie alto saxophone
Maria Dafka bayan
Dine Doneff electric guitar, stomp box, double bass, drums
Recorded live September 3, 2023
Festival of Jazz, World & Contemporary Music
Teatar Jordan H.K. Dzinot – Veles, North Macedonia
Recording engineer: Ivica Jankulovski
Remix: Dine Doneff – Domagk Cell 27, Munich
Mastering: Christoph Stickel
Cover artwork & design: Fotimi Potamia
Produced by neRED music

Just as death is eternal
So the struggle goes forever.
–Kocho Racin

Composer and multi-instrumentalist Dine Doneff calls Suite Yedi, the fourth installment of his ECM-distributed label neRED, a “sound sketch of narratives about resistance.” And so, before a single musical utterance, we are implicitly asked to consider what resistance entails. Most, I imagine, would view it as a method of opposition, whether at the individual or collective level, to some malevolent force wreaking havoc on the world on any scale. But when the bayan of Maria Dafka—one of three musicians who make up the band recorded live here under the auspices of the 2023 Festival of Jazz, World & Contemporary Music in Macedonia—unfolds in the darkness of its own regard, a deeper meaning is revealed. For while the accordion-like instrument is solitary, it comprises the voices of its ancestors and the many who share them. It is a chorus in one body sustained by multiple vectors of identity. The effect is such that when alto saxophonist James Wylie and Doneff himself on electric guitar render for us the y and z axes of this opening tune (appropriately called “Of the Memory”), we realize that resistance is ultimately not about opposition to but unity with. Just as one can be silenced by many, so can many be given hope by one.
 
Doneff’s guitar is an extension of his writing, which is the program’s backbone. Between the flowing traffic of “Yaros” and the offroading spirit of “Howl,” he merges onto and off our lane as if time were a highway to be traveled along at will. The latter’s country twang offers freer energy as Wylie stretches out his arms toward the horizon with a running start—and yet, beneath it all, the need to scream—paring down to Doneff on bass in a prayerful mode. This anchor carries over into “Naked Life,” where chords and melodies change places in stenciled light.
 
Between these milestones, we encounter the birthing pains of “Risserete,” wherein the bayan and alto meld as one while the guitar emerges aboveground, holding a scripture of its past in the hopes that a future might be possible. Dafka’s solo is a constellation shining through a smoke-tinged sky before resolving into Wylie’s monologue. Thus, each soul speaks for itself—another model for finding purpose. Doneff adds drums to make good on the promise of proximity and holds that pattern in “Minoria Grande,” allowing the theme to coalesce in a reunion that not even violence may hinder.
 
The performance closes with a contrasting diptych. Whereas “Another Chance” takes a forlorn look at things, the alto a picture of frustration resolving into fate but pulling away just before the grip of shadow becomes too ironclad to shake off, “Boombar” shines a light with its groovier bass line, a nod to how things used to be and how they might one day be again. Thus, we are reminded that, sometimes, catharsis does not happen all at once but gradually over time. In such an age as ours, where uncertainty has become the new normal (or has it always been this way?), the promise of comforts one can rely on becomes a treasure to be unearthed one footprint at a time.

Dine Doneff: Lost Anthropology (neRED/3)

| Tyran Grillo

Dine Doneff
Lost Anthropology

Mathis Mayr cello
Antonis Anissegos piano, prepared piano
Stamatis Passopoulos bayan
Dine Doneff double bass, guitar, percussion
Recorded live July 2, 2015
Einstein Kultur Munich
Engineer: Hans R. Weiss
Remix: Pande Noushin
Mastering: Tome Rapovina
Cover artwork: Fotini Potamia

For the third full installment of his neRED label series, multi-instrumentalist Dine Doneff presents a live set of seven original pieces. Playing bass, guitar, and percussion, he leads a quartet completed by cellist Mathis Mayr, pianist Antonis Anissegos, and bayan player Stamatis Passopoulos. This combination yields a fascinating gallery of scenes painted in various mediums, often within the same track. The opening “Pripapindoll,” for example, introduces us to a faintly abstract sound, a pencil sketch for the paint yet to be applied. When the melody makes itself known, it leaves a trail of pigment in search of evergreen hills beyond. The range of sonorities these instruments achieve is as varied as the topography they describe, culminating in a folk-like flourish. “Endekapalmos” follows a parallel path of development from less ordered dreams to smooth awakening, opening its vista for the bayan’s welcome entrance, sunlit and free as the wind. Doneff’s bass is the anchor for “The Fallen,” in which a groovier aesthetic prevails, the cello adding a fluid overlay, riding a wave of emotional transference from one peak to another. Mayr and Doneff carry over their traction into “Meglen,” setting up an evocative vehicle for Passopoulos and Anissegos, who trade words and memories to climactic ends. After the bayan interlude of “Exile,” a cinematic nostalgia bleeds into “Rite of Passage,” the initial flow of which clots in the improvised plasma of a prepared piano. At last, we reach the turning point of “Prolet.” Building from guitar arpeggios, it shifts into higher gear through percussive color changes, driving toward the horizon without once looking back because the only thing that matters is catching the last glimpse of sun before it dies.

Dine Doneff and neRED: A New Frontier with an Ancient Heart

| Tyran Grillo

Dine Doneff, multi-instrumentalist and composer of Macedonian extraction, is a self-taught musician with an undeniably broad spectrum of signatures at play in his creative persona. Since 2001, he has been a part of Savina Yannatou’s traveling ensemble, Primavera en Salonico, appearing (under his Greek citizenship name, Kostas Theodorou) on three ECM productions: Sumiglia, Songs Of An Other, and Songs of Thessaloniki. After being encouraged by producer Manfred Eicher to start neRED in 2017. Though still in its nascent stages, the label has put out two fascinating yet distinct sonic experiences for the world-weary listener. I recently conducted an email interview Doneff, who graciously offered his time and insights into how this all came to be. I began by asking how he came to be a part of Yannatou’s circle of phenomenal talent:

“I first met Savina purely by accident back in 2000. While visiting a Greek island for a concert, she happened to be there with the band. The bass player, due to a less fortunate type of accident, suddenly couldn’t make it for the next few concerts, so she asked if I would replace him, which I did with pleasure. One year later, I joined Primavera en Salonico permanently as percussionist.”

As for how neRED came to be, Doneff offers the following anecdote:

“Back in 2003, while touring in Germany, I had the chance to meet with Manfred Eicher. Since then, events brought us often together. He always has open ears to listen to what you do, and got to know some of my recorded projects that had never been officially released. Later on he suggested the idea of creating a label under ECM’s auspices. Such advice, not only from a friend but also a master, was not something I could ignore.”

Before getting to neRED proper, however, we cannot gloss over a beautiful little recording called Izvor. Though not originally rendered with neRED in mind, it served as something of a “test” single—a glimpse into worlds to come. Doneff explains its genesis:

“During the 90s, using a portable tape recorder, I often made short recordings with my guitar with the wish—or better, the need—to capture the mood of the day just before I went to bed. Izvor, which means ‘source’ in Macedonian, was recorded back in 1999 and is my way of representing of this sonic diary in miniature.”

Izvor cover
Izvor

Dine Doneff classical guitar
Recorded November 1999
Release date: January 26, 2017

If labeling music as cinematic hasn’t lost its currency of description, then I must wholeheartedly apply its charge here. This is not to say that Izvor moves like actors on film, but rather that Doneff’s guitar suspends time (and disbelief) in the way a camera facilitates. As memory turns into a reverie of images, words, and sensations, we might just feel the touch of something archaeological, the contact of modern tools resuscitating forgotten relics to their former intimacy, held like an offering to the very air that allows their song to resonate.

From this brief statement (one track of two minutes and forty-five seconds in duration), it is impossible to understand the spectrum of Doneff’s style, much less his inspirations. Of the latter that have come to inform his music over the years, it’s no surprise, given that the bass is among his primary instruments, that he should point to a paragon of creative inspiration:

“I am lucky to have discovered since the late 70s the work of some great musicians. But, if I have to mention one, then I would say that the remarkable personality of Charlie Haden played a big role in my artistic and social development. Especially concerning his projects with the Liberation Music Orchestra.”

While Doneff is very much his own player, perhaps we can draw a connecting thread to Haden’s likeminded ability to evoke grand scenery with minimal gestures. Nowhere truer than in Rousilvo, his first properly cataloged neRED release.

Rousilvo cover
Rousilvo

Takis Farazis piano, accordion
Kyriakos Tapakis oud, mandola
Pantelis Stoikos trumpet
Dimos Dimitriadis alto saxophone, flute
Antonis Andreou trombone
Dine Doneff double bass, guitar, tabla, vocals
Kostas Anastasiadis drums
Slava Pop’va Evdoxia Georgiou voice
Lizeta Kalimeri voice
Martha Mavroidi voice
Lada Kandarjieva soprano
Elena Ginina soprano
Elitsa Dankova mezzo
Irina Gotcheva alto
Recorded April 15-19, 2004 at Agrotikon Studio, Thessaloniki
Additional vocal recordings and editing: Jorgos Pentzikis
Engineered, remixed, and mastered by Christos Megas at Magnanimous Studio, Thessaloniki
Release date: October 27, 2017

This self-styled “Balkan-Jazz Folk Opera” pulls a creative IV from his cultural roots, drawing through that lifeline a flow of minerals, ancestry, and echoes of time. Rousilvo names the village in northwestern Greece once known as Xanthogeia, where Macedonian residents fell victim to persecution and violence at the hands of Greek’s “Hellenization” until it eventually became abandoned. To preserve this marginal community, Doneff combines recordings of the women who survived with an instrumental ensemble and septet of singers. The title of its opening movement, “Narrative,” sets not only a musical but also a conceptual tone. Voice and piano lay down a mournful theme as if standing over a broken landscape and wishing it might all go away. Conversation and birdsong mingle with clear and present melodies, so that those who never got to speak may now be heard.

Doneff further explains the genesis of what he calls his “requiem for a poetry dissolved by political decisions”:

“From a very young age I have experienced social, cultural, and political oppression as a member of the unrecognized Macedonian minority in northern Greece. Even later, as a traveling artist, I came across this issue more times that I would’ve liked. It made me angry but also sad. As I gathered enough strength to talk about it, I built up a kind of operatic structure from those emotions. The libretto includes field recordings and fragments of hidden or ‘forgotten’ songs or stories by members of that same minority.”

Appropriately enough, much of the weight of Rousilvo is carried on the shoulders of its singers. In particular, soloist Slava Pop’va Evdoxia Georgiou’s salt-of-the-earth delivery in “Penelopes of Xanthogeia” moves the heart in a scene teeming with life. Is hers a longed-for past or a hoped-for future? The question remains open, as do we to the Macedonian textures and jazz infusions of “Mirka,” wherein Martha Mavroidi’s voice, wrapped in a cloud of tabla, oud, and drums, cries without border. There is also the unaccompanied singing of Lizeta Kalimeri in “Natsko,” which turns the dawn into a score sheet to be scrawled across by the pen of hardship.

The album is also a vibrant showcase for musicianship. Like theatrical scene changes, each instrumental track is a cleansing of what came before. Highlights include “Apatris” (featuring a gorgeous saxophone solo from Dimos Dimitriadis) and “Song of the unquietness” (a mournful duet between Doneff’s guitar and the trombone of Antonis Andreou). Whether swinging in cathartic improvisation or unraveling a lullaby for the dead, these pieces straddle the line between what cannot be denied and what may never resolve.

Rousilvo, it bears mentioning, is the second part of a trilogy, of which the first part is Nostos (released in 1999 on the independent LYRA label). Doneff speaks of the trilogy itself as “a rite of passage; the long process of the transformation from what we are to what we are coming to be through time.”

We might easily wrap that description around his second neRED release, IN/OUT.

IN:OUT cover
IN/OUT

Dine Doneff piano, Fender bass, electric guitar, drums, waterphone, bendir, bells, flutes, spinetto, keyboards, mouth harmonica, field recordings
Vocal quartet in “Disquiet”:
Lada Kandarjieva soprano
Elena Ginina soprano
Elitsa Dankova mezzo
Irina Gotcheva alto
Composed & performed live by Dine Doneff on July 1, 2016, Domagk Ateliers, Munich as a part of the vernissage for In Search of a Common Ground #2, a group exhibition by eleven contemporary Macedonian artists
Recorded and mixed by Pande Noushin
Mastered by Tome Rapovina
Release date: February 9, 2019

Recorded live on July 1, 2016 as part of the vernissage for In Search of a Common Ground #2, a contemporary Macedonian art exhibition,  this “Soundscape Theater for Double Bass and Tapes” is indeed a search for commonality between the material and immaterial worlds. In light of his maturation as an artist over the decades, it finds him at a point of being able to his fear of going deeper into intimate territories of body and mind.

And what does the album’s title signify to him?

“Mainly balance. Belonging to everything and at the same time to nothing. Both sides, or spaces, are equal in quantity of action and possibilities. In our life experience we are more often in the position of the slash standing between IN and OUT, and it is in our decision to use this ‘symbol of punctuation’ to move from one side to another, however skillfully.”

Over the course of seven parts, the plucked strings of a spinet mingle with bass, the sounds of toys at an open market in Istanbul, an electric guitar, crows in Timisoara, a harmonica, a PA announcement at Zurich Airport, and more. The sensation is that of moving via portals not only through space but also through time. The added magic of field recordings allows us to experience all of this at once. There is a sense that something deeply microscopic is happening here, as if flesh itself were being folded until its inner sanctum is revealed like a diorama at the most genetic level. This method of exploration places the self on a path into the self: the meeting of salt water and fresh water.

Given such subtitles as “Division within,” “Unbelonging,” and “Exile,” it’s difficult to read this as anything but a deeply personal album:

“Indeed. It is a collection of recordings, both composed and out in the field, captured during the past decade while touring in Europe, blended in a storyline, also as a sonic diary. Then, using the recording as theater music, I performed a live monologue on my double bass, interacting with the prerecorded material. A narratively staged debate with soloist as actor/improviser in a one-act play.”

In the context of such attunement, I find myself wondering about a core concept behind it all. Hence, the very name of his label:

“Nered is a southern Slavic word and, in my mother tongue of Macedonian, describes something that has no special order. There is a village in West Macedonia, close to where I come from, that’s called Nered for being chaotic/anarchistic but still beautiful. I felt that neRED applies well to multidimensional artistic projects which have no particular sequence, pattern, or method in relation to one another.”

All of which seeks to inform his art as a space of communication and life experience. Without either, it would just be a flame without a wick. Let his candle burn for decades more.