Melnitsa

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Мельница

Origin	Moscow
Country	Russia
Years active	1999 – present
Genres	Folk Rock
Labels	CD Land
Website(s)	melnitsa.net

For the animation studio, see Melnitsa Animation Studio.

Melnitsa (Мельница, the Russian for windmill) - the cult Russian neo-folk rock band. Founded in 1999 by Natalia "Hellawes" O'Shea and Alexey "Chus" Sapkov around the remnants of a local folk band Till Eulenspiegel.

The band fuses Russian, Irish and other North European folk influences with guitar pop/rock. Natalya, the lead singer and primary songwriter, is an academic and a specialist in medieval European languages and cultures by day. Her expertise lends the typically complex fantasy-laden lyrics a degree of authenticity.

For the first several years the band had worked the club and festival circuit, earned a bona fide cult status in the folk-n-fantasy teenage sub-culture and released an acoustic album Doroga Sna (Дорога Сна, The Road of Dream) featuring the underground hit Gorets (Горец, Highlander) set to the Russian translation of Robert Burns' Highland Harry Back Again.

Luck struck in 2005, when the lead single Nochnaya Kobyla (Ночная Кобыла, Night mare) off their second, more pop-infused album Pereval (Перевал, Mountain Pass) had been snuck into rotation on Nashe Radio (the name and lyrics of the song are a complex allusion to Mara, a Norse mythical entity that caused nightmares). A grass-roots chart effort by fans propelled the song to #1 position in the "Best Of Year" chart, and the band to the small arena circuit (sparsely populated in Russia).

Their latest album Zov Krovi (Зов Крови, Call of Blood) features the same lyrical and melody themes underscored by more rhythm section support from the band.

[edit] Discography

Original title	Transliterated Title	Translation	Year of release
Дорога Сна	Doroga Sna	Path of the Dream	2003
Master of the Mill (EP)	Master of the Mill (EP)	Master of the Mill (EP)	2004
Перевал	Pereval	Mountain Pass	2005
Зов Крови	Zov Krovi	Call of the Blood	2006