2017 - August 21 - Odessa

Today I am going to play a song that for me has been mythical. When I worked in Radio Ung in my teens, there was this one album that had this mystical pull on me. It could have been the band name - Babij Jar (I have only recently discovered that they were named after a site in Kiev, Ukraine, where German forces committed a massacre in 1941 - I just thought it sounded mystical at the time). I don't think it was the album title - although The Night Before is a good one - but it could very well be the blue colors of the record cover of my memory (I always thought of an icy landscape - although that's not quite right). Or it could be the audacity of a Norwegian band recording a song that took up the entirety of side B, called Odessa after the Soviet city and mainly was built around one chord... Odds are it's all of the above.

I don't own The Night Before - or any other music by Babij Jar. But I want to. There is a lot of great Norwegian music from the mid 80s that is hard to get - especially in the states. But listening back to this song, it provides a clue to my early interest in droning music - music that my mom would call monotonous and urge me to turn off. I still remember the haunting line - "I'm gonna get back to Odessa soon..." I love this song from 1985 and a largely forgotten Norwegian band - but I invite you all to come back to Odessa with Babij Jar - I will surely be going!