Sunday
Written by Alex Harris | photos by Vanessa Tignanelli
The moment you step into The Sanctuary at St. George’s Church, you know you’re in for something special. When that something special is a part of Guelph’s oldest and most highly praised music festival, you know a “Hillside Moment” is in the making. This was a Sunday evening mass of different sorts; a gathering of culture lovers, dancers and those wishing to get to a place that only live music can take you.
At precisely 7:30 p.m. the lights dimmed, and sticking to the festival’s notoriously strict schedule, the Ukrainian band DakhaBrakha emerged. Framed by 40 foot marble arches, stained glass, and hundreds of organ pipes, Hillside founder Sam Baijal introduced the final act of the weekend. With the audience in near silence, the band began one of two sets that night with a thundering, almost tribal opening number.
The most impressive thing about DakhaBrakha is the band’s ability to weave seamlessly through so many different ingredients and genres, while maintaining a sound that was distinctly indescribable. Their songs contained elements of traditional Ukrainian folk, hip-hop, blues, and drone, occasionally bordering on ambience before settling back into a rhythmic wall of sound that must have shook the dust off corners of the cathedral not touched in 100 years. There were so many layers of sound that at certain times, if you closed your eyes, you’d swear that this band had to have more than four people.
“We like to experiment with different types of music,” said band leader Marko Halanevych, in one of his few remarks of the night. It’s hard to place this group in any particular category. Above all, this is folk music, but of a distinctly different breed than what usually comes to mind. Something darker, yet uplifting and ultimately more powerful.
There was a moment when I took a second to simply look back at the audience, and witnessed a throng of simultaneous headbobs in the pews; absolute mesmerization. There may never be another group better suited to play in the hall of The Sanctuary at St. George’s Church. May they someday return. Slava Ukrayini