Old Poems, New Sound
A new archive for old words, forgotten voices, and the music they may still carry within them.
There is something strangely moving about finding an old poem and realizing that the person who wrote it a hundred, two hundred, or even five hundred years ago was troubled by many of the same things we still carry with us today.
Love. Loss. Fear. Hope. Loneliness. Memory.
The language may have changed. The world certainly has. But the emotions often have not.
That idea sits at the heart of STRIGOI.
A project born in the Balkans.
STRIGOI Studio began with sevdah, old folk songs, forgotten verses and literary poetry from the Balkans — searching not only for the music, but for the stories, people and history that survived inside it.
Giving old words another life
For some time now, my work through STRIGOI Studio has been focused primarily on the cultural heritage of the Balkans — sevdah, old folk songs, forgotten verses, literary poetry and the stories hidden behind them.
I have spent countless hours searching through old texts, collections and fragments, trying to understand where a song came from, who first wrote or recorded it, what changed over the years, and what part of its story may have been forgotten along the way.
Then comes the musical part.
Rather than preserving these works only as historical objects, I try to give them another life through sound. Sometimes that means taking a poem that was never intended to be sung and discovering a melody inside it. Sometimes it means approaching a traditional song from an entirely different musical direction while still respecting the character of the original.
And sometimes it simply means allowing old words to be heard again by people who might otherwise never encounter them.
Why should an archive only preserve the past, when it can allow us to hear it again?
Why stop at the Balkans?
Over time, STRIGOI Studio found an audience far larger than I originally expected. What began as a relatively personal project around music, poetry and cultural memory gradually reached millions of people.
That growth made me think about something I had been considering for a long time: every culture has its forgotten songs. Every language has poems sitting quietly in old books. Every country has writers whose words are famous enough to recognize, yet increasingly rarely encountered outside classrooms.
Somewhere between an archive and a piece of music, there is an opportunity to make those words feel alive again.
That is how STRIGOI Archives began.
One of the first works to carry that idea forward was William Shakespeare’s The Wind and the Rain , the closing song from Twelfth Night — a four-hundred-year-old text that still speaks with surprising clarity about growing older, disappointment, endurance and the weather we all learn to live through.
The past, reimagined in sound.
English and German poetry. Traditional ballads. Folk texts. Historical writings. Stories, letters, literary fragments and forgotten voices — researched, rediscovered and explored through music.
First, understand the words.
Before the music comes the search: the work itself, its author, its origin, the period in which it was written and the story that surrounds it.
Then, discover what they might become.
A Victorian poem may become a dark chamber ballad. A centuries-old lyric may suddenly feel like modern folk music. Another text may need little more than a voice and a piano.
Annabel Lee
One of the first works I chose for STRIGOI Archives was Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabel Lee.
There are poems that seem to carry music inside them even before anyone writes a melody, and this has always felt like one of those poems to me.
Its repetition, its rhythm, the sea running through the poem, and the almost dreamlike way memory and grief overlap made it a natural piece to experiment with.
The goal was never to replace Poe’s poem or present a definitive interpretation. There could never be only one. This is simply one way of hearing it — one atmosphere, one voice, one attempt to let old words live for a few more minutes in a different form.
Looking outward — and looking back home.
Expanding internationally also creates another possibility that is very important to me.
STRIGOI Archives will not only bring international poetry into music. I also want it to work in the opposite direction.
The Balkans possess an enormous literary and musical heritage that much of the world has never encountered. Sevdalinka, our poets, traditional texts and the stories surrounding them rarely travel beyond the languages in which they were created.
Over time, I hope to translate and adapt some of those works for international audiences as well.
If STRIGOI Archives can introduce someone in London, Berlin, New York or somewhere entirely unexpected to a poem or song from Sarajevo, Mostar, Belgrade or another corner of the Balkans, then the project will have achieved something more meaningful than simply creating another piece of music.
The stories behind the sound.
Here I will explore the history behind individual poems and songs, the people who wrote them, forgotten versions of familiar texts, unusual historical details, new STRIGOI releases and the process of turning written words into music.
Welcome to the Archives.
I do not know exactly where STRIGOI Archives will lead. That is part of what makes starting it exciting.
There are centuries of poetry, music and stories waiting to be explored, and I am only at the beginning.
If you have found your way here early, welcome. I hope you discover a writer you have never read before, recognize yourself in words written centuries ago, learn something you did not know — or simply find a song that makes your day a little better.
The past has already given us the words. Now we get to hear what they can become.
Discover more from STRIGOI Archives
Explore the project, discover future releases, and listen to the musical adaptations behind the stories.
— STRIGOI
No comments:
Post a Comment