Worldly Savages is a trans-cultural music project birthed by Erik Mut in Belgrade, Serbia in 2008, raised in Toronto, Canada and matured touring all around Europe and is now based in London, England. Worldly Savages is a band in the Gypsy Punk tradition, combining Folk Music from Eastern Europe and beyond with Punk Rock Energy, creating fun and energetic music which gets people dancing and screaming, but also has a profound message...
The band has released 2 EPs, Crazyman (2008) and Make Them Go Insane (2011). The 2010 Stray cat tour brought the band to 12 countries across Europe and the band is planning another tour for Spring 2012, using its new home in London, UK as a jumping-off point to conquer the European Continent with their cosmopolitan trans-cultural message.
The musicians who play with the band come from many different cultural backgrounds and regions of the world. Countries which have been represented in the band's line-up during its three year history include Canada, Serbia, USA, Ukraine, France, Mexico, Chile, Scotland, Portugal, England and Russia. With the trans-cultural aspects of the music attracting and uniting players of different cultures in playing this borderless and nomadic music.
Q&A with Erik Mut (Band Leader)
Q: What is the most important thing to you about this type of music that you play?
A:Definitely the intensity and range of the emotions. Eastern European/Balkan Culture has arisen out of a turbulent history of war, ruling empires, famine, poverty, cultural confusion and many other types of struggle. The people in Eastern Europe are very familliar with sadness in general, and the music reflects this.
What the music also reflects is the desire to bring joy out of the sadness and celebrate life as it is, despite everything, leading to the most intense sense of celebration, which you also hear in the music. While living in Serbia, I got to know this cultural phenomenon very intimately, with my life in Belgrade being a rollercoaster ride of intensity. It changed me and how I look at life forever and I'm so glad for that.
I find the emotional intensity authenticity of this music to be the perfect weapon against how our world today is quickly getting less intense and authentic while becoming more boring and roboticized.
Q: How did you get into this type of music?
A: Well I'd say that I'm genetically and culturally pre-disposed to liking it. Apart from that, my father has always been very into turkish music and played it a lot while I was growing up. When I was a teenager I was into a Canadian band called the Tea Party that mixed a lot of World Music influences in their rock.
In 2005 in Toronto, I met a guy called Andrej Ristic, a Croatian-born Bosnian Serb Philosopher and Mathematician who I became very close friends with. First time we met, we immediately noticed that we had a lot in common in our cultural perspectives on life. He introduced me to the music and gave me a lot of understanding on the history of the Balkans, the culture itself and the emotions behind it.
Soon after, we together discovered Gogol Bordello, Kultur Shock and all the other amazing groups who were bringing the music into the 21st Century.
Q: How did you choose the name WORLDLY SAVAGES?
A: Through my journey of discovering myself, the cultures in my heritage and the people in places like Serbia, I started to discover something inside of me, which perhaps is inside all of us, which exists beyond any culture. That thing is a savage beast. Different cultures use different ways of keeping the beast down. It was in Serbia that my inner beast was most accepted as it were. I wanted something which expressed that idea.
Also as I traveled more and more, I found myself becoming what they call a world citizen, thinking outside of the box I was raised in, rejecting styles of thinking which didn't suit me and taking the best parts of all the culture I experienced. I wanted a name that put those two ideas together, both ideas of going beyond culture and finding something more free and personally satisfying. Thus the band became known as Worldly Savages.