Dusa

Monika Wierzbicka is no newcomer to the Polish music scene. Active since the early 2000s, she co-founded a pop band Ha-Dwa-O, spent several years singing in folk metal Żywiołak and released several albums as Nina Nu. She has traversing genres in her blood and for the last few years she concentrated on preserving traditions of Masuria, her native region. Dusa (Soul) is a direct follow-up to her last album as Nina Nu, Głos Dawnych Mazurów (The Voice of Old Masuria), where she sang 19th-century poetry. Inspired by archival recordings of local folk songs in the almost extinct local Masurian dialect, she decided to write her own songs. Wierzbicka fuses archaic dialect (all lyrics were translated to Masurian by Piotr Szatkowski) with modern, electronic, slightly jazzy music produced by Rafał Benedek. It owes much to Grzegorz Ciechowski’s classic ojDADAna, albeit more coherent and focused.

The best moments come when clarinets and saxophones (played by Wiesław Wysocki) take over song narrative as is the case of somber ‘Psies’ or melancholic ‘Litanija’. The standout track is ‘Mónz’, the jazziest of them all. To sum up, Dusa is a successful homage to, and nice modernization of, Masurian folklore.