Pavel Fajt & Stepanida Borisova: Live in Ostrava 1998

When I was surfing the web for infos on Pavel Fajt, I found some real-audio-files of a live concert of Fajt with the Yakutian singer Stepanida Borisova on Fajt's far-from-up-to-date website (what's he been doing in the past years? he must have entirely retreated from making music, maybe taking care of his family?). So, what I did with these files I found there was to download and convert them to mp3 files. (For those of you who want to know how that works, check the tutorial on Swen's blog.) As you could expect with real-player files, they were coming in a poor quality (32 kb/s and 22050 khz in this case). To prevent that the conversion to mp3 would make them even worse, I chose 128 kb/s and 44100 khz for the conversion, also following Swen's tips. However, unless there is some audience or soundboard recording circulating somewhere, this should be the only chance to get this music at all. As far as I've seen, Fajt and Borisova have never released any official record, neither studio nor live.

At first glance you might think, the setting reminds you of something. Well, sure, Fajt is again playing duets with a unique female artist. But, don't expect anything near to Bittová & Fajt. Firstly, Fajt has abandoned the purely percussive approach and incorporated some live electronics. Secondly the mood is rather meditative, ambient-like. This setting of percussion, electronics and ethnic music comes closer to some softer pieces of Mari Boine or Wimme Saari than to Iva Bittová's music. Another reference point could be the Sainkho Namtchylak of Naked Spirit. Well, if you don't expect anything like Bittová & Fajt, you might come to enjoy this music too. What we can after all say about Fajt's playing is, that he creates a good setting for Borisova's versatile shamanic voice. If you want to check the original sound source, you'll find the real-audio files here (the site's in Czech, so if you want to find the links to the files, look for the the line which says "hraj 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11", that's the second "hraj"-line). There are a lot of nice photos from several gigs around on the internet, for example here and there. Some more infos here, or just google around...

Download the mp3 files in a zipped folder here.