No one seems to know what folk tronadet (‘ruined folk’ in Catalan) and ‘progressive Gregorian’ really mean. But when Helena Ros and Marta Torrella’s friends started to label their music with these unusual sub-genres, what they were stating, after all, was that Tarta Relena’s songs belong to a world of their own. And that uniqueness is apparent listening to their debut album, Fiat Lux (‘Let There Be Light’ in Latin), which moves through Catalan, Sephardic, Mediterranean and Georgian traditional references with equal ease, but also reveals their background as members of a religious music choir.
“In the beginning, when we sang together in the choir, we would sing a lot of religious music, from several different periods, such as Renaissance, Baroque or Romantic, and in various languages,” Ros explains. They were…
