Kalemegdan Disk - ROCK FROM EASTERN EUROPE

Croatia Records Release Information

“Angel’s Breath” has been a cult album, i.e. a project of Milan Mladenović, a legendary Belgrade rock musician who unfortunately left us in November 1994, and Mitar “Suba” Subotić, a top musician who in Brazil, where he tragically died in 1999, became a prominent producer who had his best professional years still ahead of him.

The album “Angel’s Breath” was recorded and released in 1994. Twenty-six years later, Croatia Records, the Zadužbina Milana Mladenovića (Milan Mladenović Foundation) and the family of Mitar “Suba” Subotić are proud to present the reissue of the album so that the memory of Milan and Suba will live on, and their ideas and music will be absorbed by new, younger generations.

On the occasion of the reissue of the album, the Milan Mladenović Foundation also published a remastered version of the music video for the song “Crv” (Worm) on its YouTube channel. “Vi slepi, vi gluvi, vi sebični ljudi, što pravite buku bez reda i smisla“ (You blind, you deaf, you selfish people, who make noise without order and meaning), Milan sang in 1994. We can also freely sing these lyrics in 2020. It is enough to look around us. The direct reason for the creation of the lyrics of this song was the shelling of the Sarajevo Markale market during the Yugoslavian civil war. The lyrics of the song are signed by Milan and his girlfriend Maja Maričić, who after his death made the video based on his ideas.

The mission of the Milan Mladenović Foundation has been to preserve the memory of Milan, his character and work, and the reissue of this album was prepared with the care it deserves. “For more than a year, we have been working on the preparation of the reissue of Milan’s last album “Angel’s Breath”, which until now was only available to the public as a limited CD edition. In agreement with the family of Mitar “Suba” Subotić, Milan’s friend and the co-author of this album, which was recorded in 1994 in Suba’s studio in Brazil, we felt that “Angel’s Breath” should be republished, because it represents an important document of the creativity of both authors and is the crown of their long-term collaboration.

Our wish was to bring these songs closer to a new audience and to make them available in a refreshed edition with a good sound quality. We are happy that Croatia Records recognized the importance of this album and that, with their support, “Angel’s Breath” will get a new life as an LP, CD and digital release. In this way, we have saved an artistic masterpiece from decay and oblivion, to the joy of Milan’s and Suba’s admirers and all lovers of quality music”, the Milan Mladenović Foundation announced.

Milan and Suba began their friendship and collaboration in the mid-1980s when they recorded a cover of James Brown’s “Sex Machine”, and Milan also participated in Suba’s album “Disillusioned!”, released under the name Rex Illusivii, which was recorded in 1987. Collaborating later, Milan and Suba felt the world around them, every wound in it, their music sublimated the richness of the world that surrounds us, all its opposites, but not in a way that they cancel each other out and get lost in conflict, but rather complement each other, building a new world carried by rhythm, “the oldest component of music, the oldest art”.

“Today’s man is condemned to receive and experience this world through the media as a collage whose true face and wholeness he is unable to summarize into a final vision. This project, named after the all-planetary landmass that over time separated into today’s continents (the album’s working title was “Pangea”), is concerned with raising awareness of the common spirit of planet Earth in its original form, as it existed before the beginning of the disintegration process,” Milan wrote in the release booklet.

Starting with the first song “Praia do ventu eternu” (Beach of the Eternal Wind), through “Metak” (Bullet) and all the way to “Crv” (Worm) and the last, eleventh song “Velvet”, Milan and Suba take us on a spiritual journey that proves for the umpteenth time what kind of two top talents they were and how vast the scope of their musical imagination was.

In the booklet of this edition, Suba then concludes that it is about “music of the fourth world” and thus writes the following sentences: “The project for this CD was done by Milan, Žoao, Fabio and me. ... All those four special languages built a special, fifth language that produced music without the typical stamp of any of the musicians who played and participated in the creation of the music. And because of that mixture, which was created by mixing four typical stamps and created a fifth, I call this music music of the Fourth, and not of Third World.”

The album was recorded under Suba’s production baton in his Wah Wah Studio in São Paulo – far from the Yugoslavian areas, then tragically torn apart by war madness. “Describing the music recorded on it would be, as Milan himself would like to say, not only superfluous but also impossible. It was the result of the interaction of four people of different sensibilities and different backgrounds, who understood each other brilliantly exactly along the line that Milan represented his whole life: the line of spontaneity. “Angel’s Breath” was an album for the world market – as would have been much of Ekatarina Velika’s (Catherine the Great) music, packaged in an appropriate way – predestined to become a collector’s rarity.” (from the book “Mesto u mećavi” (A Place in a Blizzard) by Aleksandar Žikić.)

26 years later, the collector’s rarity is finally available as a great reissue. The art design has been done by Aleksandra Ćebić, while the great illustration is the work of Zoran Janjetov, Suba’s and Milan’s friend, who made the cover for the original edition from 1994 and the illustration for this reissue. In the booklet of the edition there is also a superb photo of Milan and Suba by Vladimir Radojičić. The subtly executed artistic design of the reissue – the black and white solution of the cover – is here to honor and preserve the memory of Milan and Suba, because their songs and ideas are what should be in the foreground.

Tracklist

1. Praia do ventu eternu 5:04
2. 40 Seconds of Love 0:39
3. Metak 7:39
4. Assassino 2:29
5. Aplauzi 1:23
6. Ogledalo 4:18
7. Courage III 3:33
8. Čaura 4:27
9. Crv 4:16
10. Madalena 1:40
11. Velvet 6:19