The connection between the earthly-social and the transcendental worlds of the gods and the dead as well as the crossing of the threshold between life and death are always enacted in the Bora Sambar Region of western Orissa through music, specific ritual instruments and ritual mediators, the musicians.
The sound of the instruments and the specific rhythm of the traditional ritual music represent the respective language of local goddesses. Together with the voices of the priest-musicians they are an expression of the communication between the world of the living, the world of the gods and the world of the dead.
The recordings for this CD - a co-production with the Berlin Ethnological Museum - were made between 2003 and 2006 in western Orissa, Eastern India and published on WERGO for the first time. Lidia Guzy, who is also responsible for the extensive liner notes, recorded this music during her 14-months-long fieldwork in the course of her research project "Music and Dance Traditions of Sambalpur/western Orissa". During this research on the immaterial culture of western Orissa, she documented unknown, forgotten or endangered musical traditions of the socially marginalized Ganda musicians and of the various non-Brahmin priest-musicians of the region.