Now More Than Ever: Mariana Sadovska and Kitka with "To the Lake"

The haunting random tune for today is by Mariana Sadovska and Kitka. Mariana Sadovska is a Germany-based Ukrainian actress, singer, musician, composer and recording artist. Emerging from the theater world in Lviv, Ukraine, Sadovska worked in theater and theater production and led ethnomusicology trips and arranged cultural exchanges with numerous countries. She moved to New York in 2001 to be a music director with theater company La Mama. During this time she also began working on her own solo performances. She released her first solo CD in 2001. Kitka is a California-based group of all female singers that focuses on Eastern European women's vocal traditions. Their name means "bouquet" in Bulgarian and Macedonian. Begun in 1979, they have contributed to major motion pictures such as Braveheart, Jacob's Ladder and Queen of the Damned and have appeared on many national radio shows around the world. This song, To the Lake, can be found on the 2007 album The Rusalka Cycle: Songs Between the Worlds, a vocal theater project and collaboration between Kitka and Sadovska that addressed the horror of the Chernobyl accident. The Rusalki are spirits of women who have died untimely or unjust deaths that reside uneasily in the earth. The project's theme is a summoning of these spirits to appease them and ask for their mediation between living humans and their environment.