Entangled Histories: Opera and Cultural Exchange Between Vienna and the Italian States After Napoleon

Ensemble: Dálava

Featured UBC Students and Alumni: Julia Úlehla (PhD ’21) and Aram Bajakian (PhD Candidate)

Recording details: Pi Recordings, April 25th, 2025

Dálava, the genre-defying ensemble led by vocalist Julia Úlehla with guitarist Aram Bajakian (Lou Reed, John Zorn, Diana Krall), returns with Understories, a deeply evocative new album that explores uncharted territories of sound. Seamlessly weaving Moravian folk traditions with an experimental, improvisational approach, Understories takes the listener on a journey through captivating sonic worlds. Dálava’s music has received critical acclaim for its expressive depth: fRoots extolled their prior release as “so overwhelming and so intense that it is hard to put into any category…. Saying that The Book of Transfigurations is a masterpiece is not an exaggeration.”

Most of the pieces in Dálava’s repertoire are inspired by a collection of folk songs compiled in the book Živá Píseň (Living Song) written by Úlehla’s great-grandfather. A biologist and ethnomusicoloist, Vladimír Úlehla (1888-1947) meticulously transcribed hundreds of folk songs from his hometown, the Moravian village of Strážnice in southeast Czechia. On Understories Julia Úlehla exhibits an ineffable kinship to these songs, a deeply-rooted living bond to the land of her father’s and great-grandfather’s birth. The American-born daughter of a refugee from communist Czechoslovakia, Julia Úlehla directs Dálava’s interpretations of these centuries-old transcriptions, ensuring they are conferred with a respect not only for the music as a historical artifact, but as living, breathing organisms that speak to their metaphysical universality. Dálava, which means ‘the disappearing line on the horizon, where sky and land merge into each other,’ is an apt description of the group’s approach: The music resides in that indeterminate, liminal space between past and future, magic and realism, neither primordial nor of this world. The album is a sonic exploration that transcends time and borders, fusing disparate traditions into a singular, emotionally charged experience.

Úlehla asserts that Understories marks a departure from her previous Dálava releases: “It used to really matter to me what my family and other Czechs —especially tradition bearers — thought about what I was doing with these songs. But at the time we made this record it felt like I was tuned to a layer of reality that was not human, fumbling through some strange form of unbidden mysticism. I’ve come to realize that to encounter the realm that the record yearns to conjure, a listener needs to be willing to venture down below — to descend through subterranean layers or meet the “understories” carried in folk song’s palimpsestic layers, some of which are fugitive and full of grief. Rather than provide a translation of the lyrical content of the songs, the song titles mark the stages of an underworld journey — what the Greeks called katabasis. “Open your ear to the great below” — the crossroad opens. “Escape velocity” — a song in which a girl leaves home and turns herself into a speckled bird corresponds to a protagonist’s decision to leave for the great below and the transformation that will be required.”

After graduating from Stanford University and the Eastman School of Music, Úlehla performed as a lyric mezzo-soprano in operas for years and was subsequently a member of the renowned laboratory theatre the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards in Pontedera, Italy. Moving to New York City to start a family with Aram, Julia began singing with Darius Jones’ Elizabeth-Caroline Unit, while also beginning explorations of her great-grandfather’s book. In 2013 the family moved to Vancouver, BC, for Julia to pursue a PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of British Columbia. On Understories, singing in Czech and English, Úlehla’s hypnotic voice vibrates with intensity, spanning from whisper to holler, by turns vulnerable and stentorian. Her singing feels less like a performance than a fully-embodied life force emanating from every sinew and bone. “I’m compelled by a desire to learn to give voice to the full range of human emotions and experiences. It’s not about using strange voices, or extended techniques, or characters. It is about collaborating with whatever comes, being utterly in the present and attentive to what is unfolding.” Bajakian, who is married to Úlehla, was an active member of the downtown New York scene who toured extensively with musicians as disparate as Lou Reed, Diana Krall and Madeleine Peyroux, and performed the music of John Zorn with the group Abraxas. He has also explored folk traditions, both with Frank London’s Glasshouse Orchestra, and his own Armenian ancestry with his project Aram Bajakian’s Kef. They are joined by Peggy Lee on cello and Josh Zubot on violin, both of whom recently appeared on Darius Jones’s fLuXkit Vancouver (i̶t̶s̶ suite but sacred), and are important parts of the fertile creative music scenes in Vancouver and Montreal. Their music is by turns ethereal and ferocious, the sound of whispering winds and the crunch of dirt underfoot as one descends into a deep, unknowable chasm.

Úlehla says: “The song poetry is gorgeous in its own right, filled with magical, uncanny stories. A swarm of bees speaks to a man’s beloved, who spurns him. A woman has been bewitched by her malevolent mother and turned into a maple tree that bleeds and speaks. A woman weaves a wedding wreath from three plants: pennyroyal, rosemary, and white roses. She sings to her wreath—who she calls “you” and who seems like a beloved in its own right—as she weaves it. Each of these plants had magical and functional properties: rosemary for courage and steadfastness, roses for love, and pennyroyal for conflict resolution and as an abortifacient. As she sings and weaves, she uses four different verbs for crying (weeping, lamenting, hollering, crying with her voice) for a person who is alternately named as “boyfriend,” “someone I don’t know,” and “husband.” Because these songs connect me with my ancestors, the journey down feels like a trans-temporal group effort. In this dive, I start wondering if the phrase “fall in love” has alchemical significance. If the falling is significant. If a mysterious love whose source is below is significant. In dark times, may we find ways to fall into this strange love, to give attention to what needs attending, to transmute what is harmful into what is healing.”

Úlehla states that her goal for this repertoire is to “follow the life and spirit of a song as a catalyst for creating sound worlds. The song poetics teach me something about life, existence, being, and about relationships between humans and more-than-humans. The compositions arise from my relationships with the songs, and the existential field and emotional terrains the songs reveal. It isn’t about a reproduction or preservation of an old thing—that is, perfectly recreating a song from the past. It’s about renewal of life, and new forms of life.” The result is a layered tapestry woven with fantastical imagery, where physical and emotional landscapes meld into one. Each song on Understories emerges as a microcosm, evoking biotic life and an inspirited netherworld.

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