Tcha Limberger – violin/voice
Sacha Gaidar – accordion/voice
Benjamin Clement – guitar
Vilmos Csikos – double bass
The long time collaboration between Tcha and button accordionist and singer Sacha Gaidar is the guiding light behind Sirin. It has developed to a quartet but with the central force still the perfectly matching sound of the two voices. The quartet concentrate on songs, and mostly songs of the last century, from Russia, Ukraine, Starogradske songs from Serbia and Bosnia. It’s very improvisational in the Russian repertoire, with movie undertones and some jazz influences.
The solid, mostly bowed, accompaniment of Vilmos Csikos with his understanding of harmony and breathtaking rhythmic changes brought by years of playing Magyar nota, and Benjamin Clement’s knowledge of Eastern European guitars and tambura from Bulgaria and Serbia the band is a tour de force of Central and Eastern Balkanistic European musical culture.
Sacha Gaidar is a self-taught musician and singer. Brought to Germany during second world war, (his grandmother was born in Poltawa Ukraine) and married in Belgium after the war was finished. He studied Russian and Serbian at the university of Gent and from his grandmother developed a passion for many styles of music, Russian traditional and contemporary, Serbian, Roumanian, Greek… He is fluent in Romanes, Roumanian, Hungarian and Greek.