Aporea - Na Rekah Vavilonskih (1988)

Aporea była wieloosobowym kolektywem pod duchową opieką oj. Stefana Sandzakowskiego z Prawosławnego Kościoła Macedonii. Starali się "obudzić narodową duchowość w ramach ojczyzny pozbawionej terytorialnych i politycznych granic". Rdzeń kolektywu stanowili Goran Trajkoski Zoran Spasowski, Metody Zlatanow i Neven Culibrik. Otaczali się malarzami ikon, muzykami, kaligrafami, ale i prominentnymi aktywistami macedońskiej sceny post-punkowej i dziennikarzami muzycznymi. Debiutowali w 1986, organizując w Banialuce artystyczny happening poruszający tematykę oddziaływań na liniach: Wschód-Zachód i tradycja-nowoczesność. Jako grupa de facto performerska, a nie muzyczna Aporea istniała do 1988 kiedy to przemieniła się w bardziej regularny zespół o nazwie Anastasia, którą możecie (choć nie sądzę) znać z fantastycznego soundtracku do filmu Milca Mancewskiego Before the Rain (1994). (zly_dotyk)

Aporea or Apokrifna Realnost (Apocryphal Reality, Macedonian Cyrillic: Апореа / Апокрифна Реалност ) from Skopje, Macedonia, was a multimedia project whose musical output could easily fit the best tradition of any ritual industrial bands that rose in mid and late 1980s era on labels like Nekrophile Rekords, ADN, Touch, etc. What was an important influence for all of the bands from Makedonska Streljba, for Aporea it was a starting ground: the active exploration of the complex relationships with their own cultural and spiritual heritage through a specific postmodern, westernized frame of work - art exhibitions, music distributing, subcultural activity, as means of reconciling their people with the new reality they were heading to, but in the same time - finding an adequate modus viviendi for an individual's own spiritual continuance within the sociological context of postmodern Europe.

In Aporea's mythology, the context in which that transition would be made possible is referred to as “New Europe” and it is best described in words of Goran Lišnjić's 1989 article “Lanterna Magica” about Aporea: “Spiritual nation becomes and remains in the spiritual homeland without borders”.

Under the spiritual guidance of Father Stefan Sandžakovski of the Macedonian Orthodox Church, Aporea was a loose collective of people of whom the most prominent were Goran Trajkoski, Zoran Spasovski, Metodi Zlatanov and Neven Ćulibrk. The remaining outer core was comprised of painters-iconographers and calligraphers Kiril Zlatanov (brother of the aforementioned Metodi) and Lazar Lečić as well as Predrag Cvetičanin, frontman of the Niš post-punk band Dobri Isak. On the eve of the last ever gig of Padot Na Vizantija, that took place in Banjaluka (Bosnia and Herzegovina) in July of 1985, Goran Trajkovski met an ardent fan of Padot Na Vizantija's work - Neven Ćulibrk (nowadays Father Jovan Ćulibrk, mentioned in the previous post), local alternative culture activist-journalist, part-time member of NEP and literature student with a particular interest in traditionalism and matters of faith. It was this friendship that made Aporea come to life and soon, in August of 1985 the first Aporea get-together was organized in Struga (Macedonia).

In April of 1986 the very first public manifestation of Aporea was organized in the Pedagogical Academy of Banjaluka in the form of an art-exhibition that tackled the issues of the relationship between the East and the West, the traditional and the modern, through referencing and juxtaposting the diverse historical avant-gardes that existed in the Balkans in various periods of time (ie the art of Leonid Šejka or Ljubomir Micić's Zenitism) that also dealt with the issue. Until autumn of 1986 Aporea made the first and only issue of their fanzine of the same name, followed by the 1987 release of a fanzine-book “Apokrifna Realnost” that had somewhat of a role of a manifest.

The only music document of Aporea “ Na Rekah Vavilonskih ” was recorded and distributed on a cheap cassette tape in 1988 for the occasion of ongoing TV documentary project about life and work of a painter-iconographer Lazar Lečić from Čurug (Serbia), a member of Aporea at the time. Due to the fact that in the brief period after the cease of activities of Padot Na Vizantija in 1985, Goran Trajkoski and Zoran Spasovski got involved with Mizar, Macedonian mega-band, as well as the fact that Neven Ćulibrk lived mostly between Zagreb and Banjaluka, Aporea only made a scarce documentation of its existence.

There isn't a strict point in time when Aporea became Anastasia ( Анастасија ), but it somehow coincided with the abandonment of Aporea's multimedia activity that a new band, a strictly music-oriented Anastasia, followed. In that respect, it could be said that Aporea lasted until 1988 when a performance/exhibition of Metodi Zlatanov's visual poetry titled “Sveti Jovan Neroden” was held in Zagreb's Lapidarij. (lastfm)