Folk & World
Gordan release “Gastarbeiter” on 20 November, their third record, on Glitterbeat Records. Gastarbeiter means “guest worker”, the name federal Germany gave the labourers it recruited from abroad starting in the 1950s, on the assumption they’d eventually go home. The record’s repertoire comes from the songs they brought with them and that stayed behind.
The trio is Serbian singer Svetlana Spajić, Austrian drummer Andi Stecher and German bassist and electronic musician Guido Möbius — the same geography as the record itself, split between the country that sent workers and the one that received them. Spajić comes from traditional Serbian singing and uses the open chest voice of Balkan tradition, set here over a backing that belongs to no single village. The label describes it as Balkan vocal heritage over hypnotic repetition, noise textures and dry minimalism.
It’s the band’s first record since their self-titled “Gordan”, from 10 May 2024, also on Glitterbeat; the first, “Down In The Meadow”, is from 2021.
The recruitment agreement between federal Germany and Yugoslavia was signed on 12 October 1968 and was the last of that series of agreements; what was left of it, besides two generations, were these songs. No show has been announced to present it yet.
Text by Alba Puiggròs