#afenginn

When I was a dumb teen, patchanka, folk-punk and stuff like that were living their highest among my peer, all of them. As the dull sheep as I was (am?) I spent too many hours listening to records of very doubtful quality just because they seemed to speak of happy people living their happy life. In the end, I realized that people of my age were just looking for the best way to get shitfaced with booze, pot et similia, and it looked like certain music genres could justify such behaviours. Back then I loved music - not getting stoned - and when I found that nobody was in for the sake of it, the veil of charme of the vapid patchanka of those years got shred, and I was finally free to listen to the better things out there. Perpretrating a mistake that only nowaday I recognize, I firmly avoided the world of that music for a lot of time, losing the worhty best of what the genre could give me - something that in the end everything has. And now, I can say that Afenginn are surely part of that worthy best. Ailing from Copenhagen, this polymorphic band leaded by the charismatic mandolin Kim Rafael Nyberg summarizes its work as "nordic melancholy and cheerful madness", an enticing description that however doesn't hold in itself the vastity of the many styles Afenginn is able to merge - from nordic folk to klezmer passing through jazz and punk rock - in the most harmonious way without compromising on the shock wave of its playing. Proposing mostly instrumental tracks, the band doesn't disdain different dimensions of the music medium, giving birth to different projects along with choirs, orchestras, ballets and guest musicians, arriving at their last records, "OPUS", which is nothing less than a modern opera composition that epitomizes Afenginn's ambition of making a music at the same time straightforward and elegant, a true universal language. If only my teen years had such bands playing around...