Branko Mataja was an innovative musician, producer, and luthier whose 1973 collection of abstract guitar meditations on the folk music of his native Yugoslavia remained in obscurity before being rediscovered in the early 2000s. In 2022, Numero Group issued a compilation of his work titled Over Fields and Mountains.

Born in 1923 in the coastal town of Bekar, which is now part of Croatia, Mataja spent his formative years in Belgrade. During the occupation of Yugoslavia by the Axis forces, he was forced into a German work camp, where he spent the greater part of World War II. After the concentration camp was liberated by American soldiers, Mataja remained in Germany and spent his days as a barber and his evenings playing his guitar for U.S. troops. He was eventually granted refugee status in the U.K., where he met and married Roksanda Radonjic, a Montenegrin refugee. The couple emigrated to Canada in 1954 after being granted British citizenship, moved to Detroit in 1963, and settled in Los Angeles the following year. It was there that Mataja began focusing on music. A self-taught luthier and electrical engineer, he built his own guitars and recording studio and began experimenting with overdubs, tape delay, and bouncing tracks. Looking to connect with his roots, which had been torn asunder during the war, he started to integrate the folk songs of his homeland into his repertoire. Using his homemade electric guitar and a four-track recorder, he created ambient, strangely beautiful, and vaguely psychedelic renderings of those ancient melodies.

In 1973, he compiled his favorites and released the LP Traditional and Folk Songs of Yugoslavia on the small, local label Essar Records to little commercial fanfare -- he issued another set of re-contextualized traditional pieces, Folk Songs of Serbia, on cassette ten years later. Branko Mataja died of a heart attack in 2000.

In 2005, musician David Jerkovich came across a copy of Traditional and Folk Songs of Yugoslavia while crate-digging in a Hollywood record store. Enamored by the striking cover photo and the wholly original sonic explorations contained within, he contacted friend Doug McGowan, who worked for specialist reissue label Numero Group. Over the next 15 years, Jerkovich and McGowan pieced together Mataja's story, and with help from his son Bata, were able to procure the original master tapes for both Traditional and Folk Songs of Yugoslavia and Folk Songs of Serbia. The resulting compilation, Over Fields and Mountains, was released in 2022. ~ James Christopher Monger