Him, four walkmans, a mixing desk and a sampler. Lenhart Tapes, the project behind the former Serbian cultural publicist, former member of the noiserock band Klopka za pionira and the duo Pamba Vladimir Lenhart, despite his modest means, produces tracks that sound like the sounds of the Earth heard from outer space. In the very process of production, in which hard industrial rhythms rub up against traditional Balkan music, there is a touch of DIY media, a fascination with disintegration, musique concréte and ethnic music.
Lenhart, now settled in Novi Sad, grew up in the Slovak diaspora in Vojvodina in northern Serbia. On his second and latest album Dens, released on Ljubljana's Glitterbeat label, he revisits, among other things, ephemeral memories of the music of his roots, such as in the track Vodu brala, inspired by the folk songs of Vojvodina's Slovak minority. "I first heard the song on a discarded cassette when the old analogue machines became obsolete due to the digitisation of local radio stations," Izvorišta describes in the newsletter.
The collection of old cassettes, which he jokingly says he buys "by the pound," provides most of the source material. Where samples aren't enough on Dens, live voices of talented female singers replace them. These include Radio Belgrade editor and experienced ethnomusicologist Tjiana Stanković, a key figure behind the final sound of the recording, who reinterprets the traditional music of the region, playing with the boundaries of its form and stripping it of the ballast of the past. "It's like creating a musical Frankenstein; I'm bringing together themes that I really love," Lenhart tells Rhythm Passport. Lenhart's tapes will be accompanied at Colours of Ostrava by award-winning Serbian singer Svetlana Spajić.