“I was born a woman” – this simple statement opens the album. What a time to be a woman, an immigrant, and a mother. The journey to MotherLand was a long one and started with Daria Kulesh’s debut album Eternal Child released ten years ago, on 31 January 2015. That deeply personal debut record deals with feelings of otherness, the experience of an immigrant reinventing her identity and creativity, as well as secret struggles with infertility combined with ambivalence toward motherhood.
MotherLand is Daria’s first full-length solo album since 2019, a product of surviving lockdowns as a new mum, a visceral reaction to our increasingly unstable and torn world where she’s feeling cut off from her own troubled homeland – Russia, and more specifically Ingushetia in the North Caucasus. The heritage that had been a strong inspiration and a focus of celebration and pride on Daria’s albums Long Lost Home and Earthly Delights, is now a source of very conflicted feelings. The styles and stories on the album are mixed and varied, too. Songs of war and exile, protest and rebellion. Songs of peace and joy, salvation and escape. Ballads of fear and of love. Rich tales dipping into several languages and spanning a huge geography: from the summit of Everest, via the Highlands of Caucasus, to the Western Isles of Scotland; from a slave ship in the Atlantic to a snowy village in Ukraine. Stories exploring identity and belonging. Songs of the past, the present and a hope for the future, against all the odds. And above it all, a plea for peace. The album was mixed and mastered by Jason Emberton and produced by Jason and Stu Hanna.
The album also features a stellar cast of instrumentalists: Jason Emberton (drums, percussion, bass, piano, keyboards, guitar, pads, strings, synth, samples, field recordings), Katrina Davies (violin), Jonny Dyer (bouzouki, mandolin, guitar), Odette Michell (backing vocals), Stu Hanna (violin, mandolin, guitar, bass) and Tristan Seume (guitar, octave mandola, banjo). Cover artwork is by Daria Kulesh.
The songs on the album are a mixture of originals by Daria, her reinventions of traditional songs from different cultures, and also two poignant cover versions: Masters of War by Bob Dylan and The Summer of ’46 by Robin Laing.
Album launch shows
31 January 2025 – full band show – The Old Town Hall, Hemel Hempstead
1 February – trio show – The Stables 2, Milton Keynes
Artist’s website: www.daria-kulesh.co.uk
‘Ataman’ – official video:
Artist’s website: www.daria-kulesh.co.uk
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