Branko Mataja

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. A...