Recorded during the 2020 lockdown, Down In The Meadow is the result of an undistracted time in a Berlin recording studio, with Serbian traditional music at its core. Together, Serbian vocalist Svetlana Spajić, Austrian percussionist Andi Stecher and German musician Guido Möbius fused songs from Spajić's repertoire with abstract instrumentals in a retelling and reimagining of the stories within them.

Although the addition of electronics to these folk songs may seem like an update, Spajić comments that the pulses of Möbius's playing simultaneously unearths something ancient. “With the discovery of the electric power we have the opportunity to hear the oldest music, the one that arrived from remote pulsars or depths of the universe, and that is the sound millions of years old,” she says via email. “This is what I hear in Guido’s creations, and unlike most of the electronically generated sounds, his are really alive and can breathe with these songs... Andi is capable to catch then these timeless signals on his drums and retell the story now, in our history, I think it is impressive how he does it."

Here the group share a video for “Woe Is Me In Foreign Lands” and Spajić explains the mode and meaning of the song to Meg Woof.

Where do the lyrics and melodic mode for “Woe Is Me In Foreign Lands” come from and what message do they hold?

The melodic mode comes from Dalmatian Serbs and the chanting style of the region has characteristic ornaments called potresanje (shaking). The lyrics are a widespread traditional form known as teško [and] can be translated as: "’tis hard, poor is, woe is me" and there is the opposite group of verses, known as lasno ti je, what’s easy. These couplets may serve as a prologue or warm-ups to an elaborate epic piece performed with the gusle [a single stringed instrument traditionally played in Southeastern Europe]. They are like proverbs, truths about life and human weaknesses, often bitter and ironic, particularly towards the madness of the old. There is also the feeling of compassion for the torments of youthful inexperience, but expressed in a tragicomic way. I had the passion of collecting those mignons from different singers, each one had some of his own.

What was the idea behind the video for the track?

We made an entire series of videos last summer which are depicting the scenes from my everyday common life in Belgrade Dorćol downtown. The idea in the video is to comment that simple everyday life with the omnipresent oral language from the past. When I say omnipresent, I think of how my old friends, singers, didn’t distance themselves from the big historical events or epic heroes in time or space. For them, it was part of their everyday life, of their living reality which constantly vibrated in front of their eyes. I was always impressed how those old people communicated among themselves, how that language produced way more intensive and complex reality. By the time, I gave my best to adopt that language and be able to communicate with them. Thus, I have two languages, the public, small talk language which I have to use to function, so to say, normally, and a private, intimate language, of my ancestors, which I wish I could use here in Belgrade everyday, just like with my old friends.

Gordan's Down In The Meadow in released by Morphine on 18 October