Purge returns off the back of some incredible releases over the course of the last year with Winter Songs, Wedding Songs, a remarkable body of traditional, polyphonic singing from Mykolaiv region of the Ukraine. Opening the lens on a sinfully overlooked body of cultural heritage, these never before released recordings encounter deeply emotive sonorities rising and falling within immersive blankets of tone generated by women's voices, touching on a vast range of subjects in the most beautiful of ways. Hugely important on historical terms, and an absolute joy in listening, Purge has pulled the stops out on this one and done some seriously amazing work.

Since its humble beginnings back in 2013, the UK based imprint, Purge, alongside its sub-imprint, purge.xxx, has steadily mined murky territories of experimental sound practice, offering particular focus to the junctures of music, sound art, and film. Increasingly prolific, over the last few years, they’ve brought us stunning obscurities from Frans Zwartjes, Carles Santos, Takashi Inagaki, John Smith, Bruce Gilbert, Trevor Mathison, Jocelyn Pook, Derek Jarman, and numerous others. Fascinatingly, while Purge’s mission statement feels fairly clear, there has always been a secondary thread running through its discography, that of the folklorist, previously highlighted by their “Book of Revelation” and “Greatest Hits” releases, and now something that its latest LP, “Winter Songs, Wedding Songs”, returns to the light. Comprising a wide range of recordings by a diverse range of traditional female singers from the Mykolaiv region of the Ukraine - banded together under the heading of Mykolaiv Singers - it’s an astounding immersion into a remarkably rich heritage of music that has rarely been heard and operates a prescient window into a culture currently suffering the gross atrocities of an unjust war.

Sung on numerous occasions, from work to weddings, the Black Sea folkloric traditions of music springing from Mykolaiv is women’s history in song, that has long been tragically neglected by folklorists and ethnologists alike, something that Purge’s latest LP, “Winter Songs, Wedding Songs”, attempts to set right. Ukraine’s Mykolaiv region is roughly located where the Ukrainian Steppe meets the Black Sea. It is an area with a diverse demography and a complex history. For thousands of years, nomadic tribes and settled people crossed paths on these lands, before becoming more densely populated during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, taking on aspects of German, Bulgarian, Jewish, Moldovan, Belarusian, and Russian culture, all of which influenced the region’s unique folkloric and musical traditions.

Polyphony occupies a central place in the songs of Mykolaiv, most often encountering a soprano voice ending each verse an octave above the melody, which is usually sung by the bass or middle voice in a three-part harmony. For years, the singer and ethnographer, Tetiano Chukno, collected a vast range of recordings made between 1983 - 2012, all of which remained unreleased in any form - save a few tapes distributed in the Mykolaiv region - of old songs, touching on the themes of Winter, weddings, resistance, recruitment into the army, baking bread, caning honey-based alcohol, and the rituals around the loss of a girl’s virginity, predominantly sung by groups of women from the villages of Mykolaiv, Ukraine.

Remarkably trance inducing for songs of everyday life and celebration, the music encountered across the length of “Winter Songs, Wedding Songs”, while vast and varied, is a deeply emotive experience that transcends the limitations of spoken language. It carries something far older and deeper, and transmits profound details - sorrow, pain, fear, and joy - below the words, hypnotizing the ear with the ebb and flow of the multiplicity of its intersecting tones.

An absolute must for any fan of polyphonic singing - Sardinian "Cantu a Tenore", Mongolia and Buryatia, Tuva, Tibetan, etc. - Purge and Tetiano Chukno’s mission to preserve the rituals and song genres in these regions, due to their antiquity, couldn’t be more noble and necessary. Beyond this basic importance, "Winter Songs, Wedding Songs” is an absolutely thrilling listen with deep feminist undertones that offers a very special focus and insight into one of the regions that has been worst affected by Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine. The vinyl LP comes complete with a 20pp booklet containing the Ukrainian original lyrics written out for the first time, alongside an English translation overseen by the poet Stephen Watts, and explanatory liner notes by Tetiano Chukno.