GANNA - SOKOLONKO
SWAP jazz festival day 3
To be honest, we invited GANNA to SWAP jazz festival for completely selfish reasons; we just love her music. The Ukrainian-born singer emigrated to Germany with her family in 2002. These days, she’s Berlin-based.
GANNA’s earlier releases (recorded with her eponymous five piece band) are a lot more jazz-centric than her later music. For the last few years, she’s predominantly worked alone or in a duo with swiss drummer/ producer Julian Sartorius, shifting the focus of her music towards loopy, intricate electro folk beats fused with Ukrainian folkloric chants.
This “new GANNA” is who we invited to our festival, not because we wanted to make some skewed statement about the Russian offense in Ukraine, but because we truly love her unique, quirky music. In fact, she was one of my top 5 artists in last year’s Spotify Wrapped.
Today’s post is focused around my favorite song of hers, SOKOLONKO (ft. Julian Sartorius), the second track on her 2023 album Kupala, GANNA’s first electronic release.
As so many of her tracks do, SOKOLONKO starts with a lonely voice, which gets enveloped in more and more layers until GANNA’s lead melody breaks out of the cloudy soundscape. I have no other way of putting it but the sound world she creates on this song is magical, almost fairylike. Her music makes me think about growing mycelia, about nature, undisturbed by humanity’s hubris, it just sounds… animistic? Can’t wait to see her perform later!
Listening to GANNA
My intro might have given off the impression that GANNA used to be a jazz musician that fully transformed into a folktronica artist, which is not even close to the truth. In reality, GANNA has always been a folklore artist and understands herself in that tradition; she just changed the way she musically frames her singing.
That’s why you should really check out all of her releases, they’re all amazing in their own right! Here’s my faves from every album:
Dykyi Lys
Witer
Daydreams
home
Spivanka
Divchyno
Kupala
SOKOLONKO
LULI
Also do yourself a favor and listen to her newest singles MERMAIDS and RANO!!!
See y’all tomorrow or at the concert later tonight,
Malik <3