The international audiovisual project Fusion by singer and composer Zuzana Mikulcová continues. The multi-genre musical fusion with Dan Bárta, Barbara Mochová, Lara Abou Hamdan, Petr Lipa, Jakub König, and Beata Hlavenková will be complemented this year by a seventh single and video called “Blind Tomorrow”, linking the Slovak and Irish scenes with an emotive duet between Mikulcová and Irish musician Graeme Mark “Grank” Donaldson. The clip was created in the Brno club Music Lab, where Mikulcová has also performed several times.
Mikulcová and her team chose a different approach for the music video. For all the previous ones, the recording and the video clip were shot simultaneously in one space. The song Blind Tomorrow was recorded in Filip Hittrich’s studio in Trnava, while the video itself was shot in the popular Brno club Music Lab; this is a favourite of the artist and where she has also performed several times.
Donaldson lives in Trnava, where he performs with his band The Native, and met Mikulcová in 2014 during a shoot for Balcony TV Bratislava. They then met at concerts, and with “Blind Tomorrow” it was time to approach Donaldson for a collaboration. “I have been following Zuzana’s collaboration with Andrej and Fusion since the beginning, and I must admit that I secretly hoped that she would approach me as a foreign performer working mainly in the Slovak realm. I even mentioned it during a radio interview, which Zuzana didn’t hear... I had to wait a while, but when she wrote to me, I hit the ceiling with joy,” says Donaldson.
“I sent a piano melody to Granko and waited to see what lyrics he would come up with. I know how hard it is to fit words into a melody line, and I was surprised how well it fit right away. It captured not only the mood, the rhythm, but also the feeling of the song. I really like songs about breakups, I’ll be honest. They belong to life and are often the most active times of creation, at least for us musicians,” Mikulcová adds.
Zuzana recorded the song “Blind Tomorrow” with the proven team Fusion. The video was filmed and edited by Dominik Janovský, the Fusion project director. The recording was again produced, programmed, and mixed by Andrej Hruška, who also plays guitar and synthesizers in the song. Michal Šelep plays the double bass. In addition to the vocals of Zuzana Mikulcová and Graeme Marek, an unusual musical instrument appears in the track – the bodhrán.
“In each song of the Fusion project we used a specialty instrument and sound. Because Granko is from Ireland, he designed the traditional bodhrán instrument himself. Coincidentally, he also knew a player who plays it very well and is also from Trnava. Monika Blaško, despite her initial doubts whether it would be possible with such an atypical instrument, quickly convinced us otherwise. She came to the recording session perfectly prepared and brought a lot of ideas that gave the song the right touch,” Mikulcová recalls.
The Fusion project, highlighting music as a universal language, began three years ago, and in 2021 took the unconventional form of an ecological album on a wooden USB. Mikulcová embodied in it her need to respond through music to the social situation concerning national minorities and growing extremism and racism.
Mikulcová wants to continue to break down imaginary boundaries with her Fusion project and create not only musical but also human and social connections between different cultures and languages through the collaboration of artists. The eighth and final author-singer collaboration will soon be added to Fusion.
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