It takes a certain confidence to take a ferocious and freewheeling album and call it simply Folk Songs. Tijana Stanković is a Serbian violin player, singer and ethnomusicologist, and her new disc is four extended tracks which riff loosely around Balkan folk themes – there’s a “Song For The Bees”, and a “Song For The Queen”. The result, recorded at Stockholm’s Fylkingen by musician and curator John Chantler, is as hardy and exhilarating as the double bass improvisations of Peter Kowald or Joëlle Léandre.

Stanković in one of several players in the current moment harnessing the power of violins and violas as noise machines. Laura Ortman’s Apache violin performances, augmented by effects pedals, are so abrasive that can slug it out with performers at notorious noise jams like Ende Tymes. Joanna Matrey has recorded several discs for US label Notice Recordings using extended instrumental techniques that draw out unusual harmonics and the resonant potential of the viola’s wooden body.

Folk Songs also slots neatly into another zone of fertile contemporary experimental music, which is the many European groups, from Širom to Razen, using strange acoustic qualities of string instruments to access altered states that usually involve electrification. A great playlist for further listening here is Miloš Hroch’s Hurdy-Gurdy And Other Weird Sounds playlist for The Wire.

Folk Songs, recorded in front of an audience, is a wild ride. Stanković stretches out drone notes, extemporises around them, divines uncanny resonances from her instrument, and vocalises over the whole lot, so that by the time the song elements arrive on “Song For The Queen” and “Song For The Bees”, it’s as if they’ve been dredged up from deep in the memory. She does not just sing but yodels, hiccups and hollers, with the vocals like the violin skirting the boundary between tone and noise. The singing alongside a solo string instrument can’t help but recall Arthur Russell’s World Of Echo a little, but Folk Songs is less of an inward exploration, and more of an openended people’s music.

The Balkans is a meeting point for many of Europe’s musical currents, North to South, East to West, and Stanković herself knits several different music networks together into her expanded practice of folk music. As well as Sweden’s Fylkingen, she’s recorded at the country’s renowned EMS electroacoustic music studios. That album was a collaboration with Diana Miron of the Hyperion Ensemble, Romanian spectralist music specialists who Stanković has also played with. She’s also recorded a great set with another adventurous Balkan violinist, Ana Kravanja of Širom.

But one of Stanković’s closest engagements is with the wild Belgrade ethno-noise unit Lenhart Tapes, who throw slices of noise, free jazz, and Balkan folk song into ecstatic, spiralling jams. Miloš wrote a great article on Lenhart Tapes in The Wire 463. Their gig at Slovenia’s MENT festival a couple of years ago was a crazy night. Neither seemed sure or bothered about where the songs were going, just as long as the energy levels kept increasing. A barrage of percussion noise, an exhilarating sax squeal or a call-and-response folk chant all led the same way. That the cassette tape deck and violin somehow ended up in a back and forth contest was testament to the skill and openmindedness of both players.

It must take a certain confidence to call this album Folk Songs, but that’s the source that all this music comes from. You can check it out via the The Association for Free Improvised Music.