Kololira

Now, 20 years since she began singing ancient traditional Croatian folk songs accompanying herself on the guitar, Dunja Knebl (www.dunjaknebl.com) is a member of the new band called Kololira (Croatian word for hurdy-gurdy) that has done wonders within the space of just a year. Kololira’s first album “Tamo doli” (Dunja Knebl’s twelfth album) has already won critical acclaim and has proved to be as interesting and intriguing as the band’s live performances, perhaps due to the unusual combination of instruments (hurdy-gurdy, accordion, guitars, djembe, floor tom, alto recorder, tin whistles) played by Danijel Maoduš (Afion, Kazan), Hrvoje Ban (Vuge, Savski Valovi), and Martin Turščić (Naš mali Afro Bend, Ansambl Forfaitz) producing an original sound in accompanying ancient folk songs sounding at the same time like mystical music from the past and contemporary “world music”. After listening to Kololira performing at the Ethnoambient Festival (Solin, July 2013), Elizabeth Kinder wrote in her column of the October fRoots issue: "It was odd, or maybe perfect synchronicity, that I’d been thinking about Charlie Gillett moments before and how he might have liked the brilliant Croatian folk band Kololira that had just been playing. The ancient songs sounded so cool and modern with singer Dunja Knebl (reminding me of Nico at her best), doing what Shirley Collins did for English folk song." One of the songs (Čula jesam) from Kololira's album "Tamo doli" has been included in the fRoots 336/337 issue’s (January/February 2014 compilation-http://www.frootsmag.com/content/freecd/47/).