I love beautiful landscapes: sometimes they have the same effect on my soul as a well-handled bow has on a resounding violin. They create crazy feelings.

～ Stendhal, Memories of a Tourist

Barbaric Violins – here’s the promise of lift-off towards soundscapes of breathtaking abundance. We will cross them in a hang-glider, a pirogue or on the back of a donkey – but never in the antiseptic comfort of business class. This is rock ‘n roll – even if we do enjoy a couple of breaks with our feet in the mountain stream.

Barbaric Violins prove to those who are yet to be convinced that our identity has every chance of being enriched when we are in touch with our neighbour. The three musicians play sounds from their own countries (and play around with them), all the while singing universal songs. They are the personification of that law of optimism: ‘the more you know about where you come from, the further you can see’.

Enkhjargal Dandarvaanchig, aka Epi, is Mongolian. He is a master of the horsehead fiddle morin khoor and of overtone chant; he merrily spans four octaves. Fabien Guyot is a French percussionist expert in improvisation and knows all about the rhythms of the African ancestors. Dimitar Gougov the Bulgarian started the project. He plays the gadulka, a fiddle popular in the Balkans that has three melodic strings and 11 resonating strings.

Mischievous – they’re not really violins and not really barbaric. They are reinventing traditional music into a sort of electric road movie in which unpredictable lands pass by, steppes criss-crossed by nomadic tribes with gypsy horses in the undergrowth. Watch out – here they come!

Website: http://www.violonsbarbares.com/

Excerpt: https://youtu.be/e0svQa3l5SA