This Daily Discovery isn’t the usual kind… These features normally just point you towards something worth hearing and watching; this one also asks you to help.
Alice in WonderBand are Ana Vrbaški and Marko Dinjaški, a Serbian duo who have been together on stage and off it for 28 years. They live out near the Fruška Gora National Park in the north of the country and make all their music from the body: hands clapping and snapping, feet stamping the floor, chests and thighs slapped for the low end, tongues and mouth clicks filling the gaps, Ana at the piano, Marko on didgeridoo and darbuka, and the tunes carried in their voices. Most of what they sing began as Balkan folk song, which they take apart and rebuild in the odd, uneven rhythms of the region.
On 11 July, Ana was seriously injured as a passenger in a car accident, and she now faces a long period of treatment and rehabilitation. The couple had a full summer of concerts ahead of them, and all of it has fallen through, their income with it. Friends have set up a fundraiser to help meet the cost of her care and steady the months to come. You can donate HERE, or give directly through PayPal at THIS LINK. If a donation isn’t possible, sharing it helps just as much.
The song in the video is one of theirs. “Dokonanje”, which roughly means being idle, is a track from their new album, The Courage to be Afraid. They recorded it in May with their daughter, Alisa Dinjaški, alongside “Vrbice, Vrbo Zeljena”, a Gorani song from Kosovo. It is an old piece, written almost twenty years ago, and the words still read like a motto. “Dokonanje” means being idle, but the song argues the opposite: the refrain insists “We’re not being idle”, then lists the digging, mowing and carrying of water that fills the day.
The video was filmed at Slovenia’s Kavč festival, a travelling event that for ten years has staged concerts in living rooms, bookshops and town squares under Matija Solce. Alice in WonderBand played the Fragmenti bookshop in Kranj.
This year Ana and Marko, together with Julia Lewandowska and Łukasz Malok from CISI, also brought Slavyk to life, a quartet that sets Silesian and Serbian folk traditions to English lyrics. Their debut, 11 Songs of Love and Suffering, was released this June on CPL Music.