The story of creation of this album first of all is the story of true friendship, understanding and creative pursuit of harmony, despite of all difficulties. "Olchey" project was conceived once by an actor and musician George Beletsky, as a platform for creative experimentation and as an attempt to bring together European and Asian ethnic paradigm through direct dialogue of musicians of various nations. "Olchey" was not just another group performing Tuvan folklore. The main task of the team always was searching for new forms of intercultural communication and fresh points of contact for ancient traditional wisdom with overspeeding and modifying spirit of modern times.
And now, after several years of experiments and searches fate brought members of Olchey with two musicians from the famous Karelian folk band "Va-ta-ga", who is not only shared their strong interest to the northern traditional music and ethno-experiments, but could offer them very concrete cooperation in creating a completely new sound and repertoire of a band. This album results a long and very interesting creative work of this musical fellowship made of a hours and hours of improvised session in the studios, numerous live concerts and of course a joint trips to Karelia and Tuva. The name of this CD ("Shuga") is a very accurately reflection of true musical spirit of this work. Karelian word "shuga" is translated as a fragile layer of ice at the water's edge and this word echoes with the same highly conformable Tuvan word "chuga" (thin), which is an obvious metaphor for the almost invisible lines, which are bind together peoples of the East and West so different from each other by culture, but so close by spirit into a one mystical knot of understanding and true friendship.
