It’s well into New Year and we’re in the very very very cold city of Bucharest to play a gig (it’s -13 degrees here!). We’ve only just started recording samples for Orchestra of Samples, so it was great when Denisa Popa, a Romanian friend of ours, offered to introduce us to Florin Iordan and Calin Torsan and to record in a local photographic studio.

Florin and Calin are both fantastic flutists from Bucharest. They collect and play traditional instruments from different Romanian regions, and both came to the recording session with a huge collection of flutes and pipes, including caval, fluier, gemanat, tilinca (or telenka) and talv. Calin plays in a number of bands including Jazzadezz (found this interesting interview with him) and Florin is an ethnomusicologist at the Romanian Peasant Museum and plays cobza, a ten-stringed lute-style instrument, with his band Trei Parale, who specialise in music from the Carpathian region.

Bizarrely, after a fantastic recording session during the day, we went back to our hotel, turned on the TV and found Florin and his band Trei Parale performing live on a chat show! Very very surreal indeed!

Massive thanks to Denisa Popa, and also Boogie from Din Casa.