Catalogue: Gypsy and Balkan: "World After History" - Boris Kovac

"I can't change or stop history - I just could say: history is over - for a moment - for the time of the music we play on this album."

In Boris Kovac's mind it is always 3 am and the world is at its lowest ebb, which helps explain the overwhelming melancholy underpinning this album. Even in its most playful moments, the music seems to drift ghostlike around an empty globe. It's like the songs are being performed in some wrecked, post-apocalyptica cabaret where the drink flows far too freely to keep shadows at bay. A new light is dawning and La Campanella's Pannonian-Mediterranean round-trip creates sentimental spaces, interrelated by the threads of nostalgia, joy, tristesa, romantic enthusiasm and melancholy. There's an eerie, dead beauty about it all, as if someone had pieced together shards of melodies from all over the world to make tunes that defy nationality. It's art music and high concept, but it works magnificently.

Press Quotes

"The tracks (...) are a completely engaging mixture of melancholy and chipper that embraces influences as far afield as Gypsy swing, French cabaret and tango. The band is tight and attuned, moving easily from stately melodic flows to flourishing interludes and occasional, almost-subliminal vocal passages that bring variety and nuance to each piece. There is sadness and longing in this music, but joyful release in equal measure. Very nice."
Tom Orr, Global Rhythm

"Kovac creates long, creeping symphonies that are more potent sedatives than drilling rhythms. World After History, like his prior efforts The Last Balkan Tango and Ballads at the End of Time, is future classical, as nimble and light as it is charged. As a result of his theater passions, Kovac takes the empty space of sound and fills it majestically."
Global Beat Fusion