Rousilvo is the old Slavic name of Xanthogeia, a village in northwestern Greece whose Macedonian-speaking community was targeted by the Greek state's policy of Hellenization until the village was abandoned. Dine Doneff, a Macedonian composer and multi-instrumentalist who grew up near Edessa, built this album around its songs and memories. He calls it a "Balkan-Jazz Folk Opera", and it is the first release on neRED, the label he founded with painter and photographer Fotini Potamia.
Doneff is self-taught and since 2001 has played in Savina Yannatou's Primavera en Salonico, which records for ECM. Rousilvo was recorded on 15-19 April 2004 at Agrotikon Studio in Thessaloniki and later remixed and mastered by Christos Megas at Magnanimus Studio. Doneff plays double bass, guitar and tabla and sings. Around him are Takis Farazis on piano and accordion, Kyriakos Tapakis on oud and mandola, Dimos Dimitriadis on saxophone and flute, with trumpet, trombone and drums. The singers include Martha Mavroidi and the vocal group Camea Quartet.
The music moves between written ensemble pieces and the voices of the village itself. Recordings of elderly women singing and telling their stories run through the album, beginning with Narrative. In Penelopes of Xanthogeia and Kaimaktsalan the four female voices of the Camea Quartet stand against the band. Mirka, the longest piece at seven and a half minutes, features Mavroidi. Ajde sl'ntse zajdi is a traditional song of barely a minute, the only piece on the album not composed by Doneff.
Rousilvo is the second part of a trilogy that began with Nostos, released in 1999 on the Athens label LYRA. Doneff first issued it in Greece in a limited edition in 2010. He describes the trilogy as "a rite of passage", a slow transformation from what we are to what we are becoming. Its new life came after Manfred Eicher suggested that Doneff start his own label, distributed with ECM. In a 2020 feature on Between Sound and Space, Tyran Grillo noted that Doneff draws on "forgotten" songs and stories of the unrecognised Macedonian minority in northern Greece, his own community.
CD, catalogue neRED/1, released by neRED music in cooperation with ECM Records in late 2017 (ECM dates it January 2018).
