World Of Echo
Ultra-rare recordings from a Croatian-American folk guitarist who unites the sounds of east and west. By Andrew Male. Branko Mataja ★★★★ Over Fields And Mountains NUMERO GROUP. DL/LP
FROM THE opening track, an instrumental re-imagining of Serbian ballad Da Smo Se Ranije Sreli (Yes We Have Met Before) you know you’re in the presence of a unique and strange talent. The roots are Eastern European folk, certainly, but this is music that emerges rather than begins. Materialising from a mist of reverb, Mataja’s eerie guitar glistens with a melancholy delay, as a low rumble, possibly from a Leslie speaker, resembles the solemn humming of a distant choir. There are suggestions of Joe Meek’s New World and Pops Staples’ tremolo ghosts, but also Spacemen 3’s E-chord ecstasy and The Ventures’ electric country twang. It sounds simultaneously ancient and futuristic, familiar yet unique. It’s a miracle that it is even here.
Born in Dalmatia, now Croatia, in 1923, but raised in Belgrade, Branko Mataja built his first guitar at age 10. After spending the Second World War in a German labour camp, he moved to a Displaced Persons camp in North Yorkshire before emigrating to Canada, then Detroit, then Las Vegas, before settling in North Hollywood in 1964 where he worked as a guitar repairer. At some point in the early ’70s Mataja recorded for John Filcich’s
Festival Records, a store and distributor dedicated to
Eastern European folk music. Jump forward to 2005 and LA musician David Jerkovich is exploring the Yugoslavian music in Counterpoint Records & Books in East Hollywood when he picks up
Traditional And Folk Songs Of Yugoslavia by Branko Mataja. Now, after over a decade of negotiation with Mataja’s family, here it is, complete with tracks from its cassette-only mid-’80s follow-up, Folk Songs Of Serbia.
According to his son Bata, Branko’s unique guitar sound was down to DIY experimentation incorporating tape delay and attempts to emulate traditional folk instruments – flutes, lutes, etc – with his guitar. But also “a guitar action as low as humanly possible, to incorporate onehanded hammering”. The result, on tracks such as Kad Ja Podoh Na Bembasu (When I Went To Bembasa) and Zapletnicki Cacak (Caught Up In Cacakis) is akin to hearing Eddie Van Halen shredding Anton Karas’ Third Man score.
The album was released in 1973, on local vanity label Essar Records, available for $6.50, postage included. However, Branko, who died in 2000, made his real living fixing guitars belonging to the likes of Johnny Cash and Geddy Lee. He never went back to Yugoslavia, and later proudly discovered that his mother had been born in America. And at times, Branko transforms these Eastern instrumentals into the country & western electric wail of Luther Perkins, or Alessandro Alessandroni’s tense spaghetti western dramas.
It is the sound of assimilation, yet beneath it all remains that low rumble of ache and regret, that spinning Leslie speaker like a high wind from the Dalmatian mountains, or the massed wail of a thousand ghosts.