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Kottarashky & The Rain Dogs
Minimalist Ethno-Electronica from Bulgaria
Booking: Gregor Rajewsky 
booking@asphalt-tango.de
Sofia-based Nikola Gruev aka Kottarashky created a new Balkan
soundtrack when he unleashed "Opa Hey!" on an unsuspecting world in
late-2009. Here the young architect mixed electronic beats with
samples of instruments and voices from Bulgarian and Macedonian folk
and Gypsy musicians. While the sampling of Balkan brass orchestras
over thudding techno beats was briefly a craze in the mid-noughties
Gruev marks a clear distance between himself and this
movement. His music is, he emphasises, not simply aimed at creating
dancefloor exotica but instead involves a dialogue that feeds back
and forth between ancient Bulgarian/Macedonian music forms and the
post-Communist sounds he grew up with.
Gruev is only in his early thirties and grew up with one ear attuned to Western musical imports and the other ear attentive to Bulgarian Gypsy clarinet legends Ivo Papasov and Boril Iliev. A disciple of minimalism in architecture and music, he is intent on building a sonic space that allows the interplay between organic instrumentation and computer-generated rhythms. "Opa Hey!" relishes the tension between the two music forms, one hard and angular, the other rich and ornamented. In bringing these sounds together Kottarashky leaves a lot of space for the listener to inhabit the sonic collage, to move amongst these conflicting but never clashing music forms, to imagine a Bulgarian music where village roots and urban fervour come together and shift shapes. Kottarashky's music is spacey, psychedelic in the best sense, rich in imagination and full of flavour.
Kottarashky - it means "tom cat" in Bulgarian - is intent on creating a sonic collage (as opposed to dancefloor boogie) and Opa Hey's cool, fluid blend of acoustic and electronic music created a soundscape that both charmed and haunted all who heard it. The late, great BBC DJ Charlie Gillett championed "Opa Hey!" - the very final CD he chose as Album Of The Month for The Observer. Likewise listeners across Europe embraced "Opa Hey!" and the album reached No 3 in the European World Music charts. Since then it has been both blasted in cafes and clubs and championed as a superb example of the electronic psych-folk underground. Gruev admits he was surprised that people reacted so strongly to sounds he created initially as a personal project, a way for him to reflect on the southern Balkan roots music he loved and the electronic rhythms and cut 'n' paste assemblage culture he heard on Western tunes.
Rather than returning to his bedroom to build more assemblages Gruev has turned Kottarashky into a live band with drums, bass, clarinet and his mixing skills. Across the summer of 2010 Kottarashky the band have wowed audiences at festivals and in clubs both at home and in Western Europe. The journey that began with Gruev looping Jony Iliev's rasping vocal over a jazzy drum programme is now taking shape as 21st Century pan-Balkan music. Where will Kottarashky take his new sound? Will he employ a gaida (Bulgarian bagpipe) player and singers? He smiles and says nothing. Keep your ears very, very open!
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