Krilja Duo

Tradition and innovation meet in passionate Roma songs about suffering and love!

Krilja Duo is a Gothenburg-based group that plays traditional Romani songs from Russia and Eastern Europe. The music is of indeterminate age but in many cases from the 1800th century onwards, and shifts between the lyrically melancholic and the fieryly intense. The lyrics are in Romanesque and Russian and are about sadness, pain, poverty and suffering, but also about love and passion.

Originally the group was a trio called Krilja, but now it is a duo consisting of the singer and guitarist (also the founder) Marita Johansson and Jonas Liljeström on violin and vocals. Marita Johansson is a zealot for Romani culture who has spent 25 years collecting Romani folk songs and adding them to her repertoire - she has also studied Romanesque and Russian. Jonas Liljeström also has long experience of playing Roma music in various constellations.

The arrangements consist of their own interpretations that the musicians have improvised, always with love and respect for the tradition from which the music comes.

The name Krilja means "wings" in some Roma dialects and also in Russian.

Krilja Duo has mostly performed in Sweden since the group's founding, but has also toured with great success in Scotland in 2013 and in Iceland in 2017.

In addition to regular concert activities, Krilja Duo also offers a combined lecture and concert where the group's violinist Jonas Liljeström talks about the history, culture and music of the Roma, with examples of music that the group performs live. The total length is about 90 minutes. The group has previously held this lecture at, among others, Gothenburg University Library, Billströmska Folkhögskolan and the Siglufjör∂ur Folk Music Festival in Iceland. If the intended target group is not obviously familiar with lectures, the lecture concert is also available in a "light version" - it is essentially structured like a regular concert but with concise and easily accessible monologues between the songs that tell about the topic. The light version of the talk is rounded off with a question and answer session and is just over an hour long in total. In addition to being a professional musician, Jonas is also a doctoral student in musicology at the University of Gothenburg.

Krilja's debut album received rave reviews and has been played on radio all over the world. The group's second album with the title "Sosnitsa: Roma Music from Russia & Eastern Europe" (recorded at Studio Epidemin in Gothenburg in the spring of 2023) was released in October 2023. It has received many enthusiastic reviews in both Swedish and foreign music press and has also been on the prestigious the Transglobal World Music Chart chart. It has also been played on radio all over the world, including on the Austrian national radio channel Österreich 1.

Excerpt from review:

"Sung for the most part by Johansson using the Romanes language, these are songs of courtship, love and marriage, whether that's the eloping lovers of "Malyarkitsa" or the lost love of "Beryuzovie Kalyechke". It's all performed by musicians who clearly have a deep love and respect for the music and who manage to convey the passion, joy and heartache of the material, with Johansson's vocals covering a range of emotions from world weariness to upbeat.” / Chris Haslam, Rock'n'Reel Magazine, February 2024.

Marita Johansson: vocals, guitar
Jonas Liljeström: violin, vocals

(The band photo was taken by Stig-Magnus Thorsén.)