World of music
Musicians from Egypt, Ecuador and a host of other countries will perform at ¡Globalquerque!
Mark Marczyk is inspired by his surroundings.
That’s why he’s looking forward to performing in New Mexico for the first time this weekend.
Marczyk is the leader of the Toronto-based guerrilla-folk party-punk collective Lemon Bucket Orkestra.
The band will perform at 10:20 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 22, in the Plaza Mayor at the National Hispanic Cultural Center.
“I’ve heard amazing things about New Mexico,” he says. “I want to make sure and get out to the desert. That’s part of the world we haven’t experienced yet.”
Marczyk says New Mexico is a place where the Old World and the New World coexist.
“That’s part of our ethos as a band,” he says. “It’s where the two worlds collide. We really react well to our environment. It’s a big part of our life as a band. For us, every place we go, we get excited about. We come from a musical tradition that we’re so inspired by the location/place. It’s integral to how we perform and play.”
The band will be bringing the new material from its latest album, “If I Had the Strength.”
Two years in the making, the new album once again draws its repertoire and inspiration from folk traditions across eastern Europe.
But unlike the band’s two previous albums — 2012’s “Lume, Lume” and 2015’s “Moorka” — the new album explores an overarching narrative through line, to tell a much bigger story.
“This is an album about coming home, about never being the same, about the parts of ourselves we lose, the parts we gain, and about the prisons we inhabit or that inhabit us,” Marczyk says.
Marczyk says the music is inspired by a century-old Slavic prison ballad that tells the story of a young rebel coming home after laying it all on the line.
The work draws emotional weight from the band’s personal experiences with the Ukraine-Russia conflict, but it also highlights the 12-member ensemble’s party-punk roots and attitude, developed and honed since their formative days busking on the streets of Toronto.
“We start in a musty train car overlooking the fields and valleys of our youth through permanently smudged windows, reflecting on the life that once was and wondering how we can face our mothers with the horrifying fact that we will never be the beloved boys or girls we once were,” Marczyk says. “Then, with a sudden jolt we are transported to the memory of what led us to this moment and we’re sprinting for dear life in a struggle to keep ahead of our past selves. The whole album navigates between the shaky train car and a series of flashbacks — in the language of east European folklore — the main site of resistance and celebration for the Lemon Bucket Orkestra for the better part of the past decade.”