Ethnic Folk Music Archive from Poland & Eastern Europe - Here Come the Metos! A Band from Glina

Music Lost/Found
Here Come the Metos! A Band from Glina
Ethnic folk music archive from Eastern Europe (Poland)
Recordings from Andrzej Bienkowski's archives from years 1981-1993
www.musiclostfound.com

Label: Muzyka Odnaleziona, Poland (2007)
Catalogue No: 003
Format: Book with CD
Book: 40 pages, size 15 X 14 cm (5.5" x 5.9"), hard cover binding, in Polish language, many photos with detailed description.
CD: 25 tracks, total time 67 min

Here Come the Metos! A Band from Glina

Central Poland. The Meto Brothers, playing only on fiddle and basses, created an immense wall of sound, while the bass voice of Józef Meto - bass was more reminiscent of Mississippi blues than of Polish rural music. In the background we could hear voices, groaning, people calling to one another. This created a sense of great effort, a summons from a distant world.

The expression of their music has always moved me. Kazimierz and Józef Meto - bass managed to preserve their music in its nineteenth century form. At the same time, their dynamics are closer to those of contemporary rock music. It was at one of these gatherings where the decision to create the Music Lost & Found publishing company was taken.


Andrzej Bienkowski

Program:

1.  Oberek / Kazimierz Meto - fiddle, Józef Meto - bass, Jan Lucka - tambourine (1993)

3.  Oberek / Kazimierz Meto - fiddle, Józef Meto - bass, Jan Lucka - tambourine (1993)

5.  The Story by Kazimierz Meto and Anna Koprek / Kazimierz Meto - fiddle, Anna Koprek - voice (1989)

7. Mazurka / Kazimierz Meto - fiddle, Józef Meto - bass, Jan Lucka - tambourine (1993)

9. Solo / Kazimierz Meto - fiddle (1987)

11. Mazurka / Kazimierz Meto - fiddle (1980)

13. Bachelor's Mazurka - Oh girl, get up in the morning / Kazimierz Meto - fiddle, Józef Meto - bass (1989)

15. Mazurka from our parish / Kazimierz Meto - fiddle, Józef Meto - bass, Jan Lucka - tambourine (1993)

17. Sheep-dog / Kazimierz Meto - fiddle, Józef Meto - bass, Wladyslaw Gmaj - vocal (1980)

19. Good Morning - Weeding song / Helena Szczur - vocal (1993)

21. Bachelor's Mazurka / Kazimierz Meto - fiddle, Józef Meto - bass, Józefa Sobolewska - vocal (1993)

23. Oberek / Kazimierz Meto - fiddle, Józef Meto - bass, Jan Lucka - tambourine (1993)

25.  Oberek / Kazimierz Meto - fiddle, Józef Meto - bass, Jan Lucka - tambourine (1993)

About Music Lost/Found Series

Poland, 1980, and Communism is facing collapse. Petrol is being rationed, the shops are empty. I begin my journey through the countryside to record music. It’s strange, because there are a great many folk bands, but their services are no longer required in the villages or towns. Musicians stop playing and sell off their instruments; slowly but surely they are forgotten. The first difficulty we faced was finding them replacement instruments. I met musicians who hadn’t seen each other in years, having once played weddings together regularly; this was the last generation of village musicians. Then came the dawn of the pop era. We filmed and made unique music recordings in the musicians’ homes, which were natural, stress-free environments. We searched throughout Poland, Ukraine and Belarus and found 1500 musicians, as well as singers, and from this number we reconstructed eighty bands. Our archive contains recordings of some of the oldest village bands, as well as contemporary wedding music. We have thousands of field photographs. However, the real jewels in our collection are undoubtedly the photographs taken by the original village photographers, who faithfully captured weddings, parties, funerals and daily life.

Andrzej Bienkowski

Andrzej Bienkowski is a painter, ethnographer, writer and professor at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. For the last thirty years he has traversed rural Poland to document and record the music of village fiddlers, accordionists and singers. He has produced many books and films about rural Polish music, including the Music Lost & Found series. He owns the largest private collection of rural music in Poland.

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