Julia Úlehla & Dálava

Though Julia Úlehla was born in the United States and is now based in British Columbia, she inherited a wealth of Czech music. More than a century ago, her great grandfather, Vladimír Úlehla, collected hundreds of folk tunes from Strážnice, a village of a few thousand in the South Moravian Region. Those transcriptions were long censored, but Úlehla—a classically trained singer, actress, and teacher—has revived them in entirely unexpected ways through Dálava, her amorphous ensemble with husband and guitarist Aram Bajakian. On Understories, one of 2025’s most intriguing records, Bajakian and Úlehla recast those songs through longform tracks that twinkle like haunted early 4AD works (“The Way Up”) or command with the dramatic dynamics of Diamanda Galás (“Bowed Low”).

“It used to really matter to me what my family and other Czechs—especially tradition bearers— thought about what I was doing with these songs,” Úlehla said of the still-striking Dálava albums that preceded Understories. This time, though, she wanted to do more than bring these transcriptions back to life but instead capture their essence and spirit, to turn them into something relevant and legible for contemporary audiences. A longtime collaborator to John Zorn and Lou Reed, Bajakian is an imaginative guitarist up to that challenge, from the rhythmic noise bursts that anchor “Open Your Ear to the Great Below” to the arid riff abstractions of “Phase Transition.” Dálava is a Czech word that refers to the magical horizon line that divides earth from sky; this project increasingly inhabits that liminal space, where past and present morph into unforeseen new shapes.