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Last month we investigated a compilation from the Moscow Electrosound label that included an intriguing track by 30[eks], otherwise known as Zakhar Elin, a Kazan-based artist. In framing that composition, we drew upon a few useful comments from Russian webzines. One of them read: "The first time you listen to a 30[eks] song, you think: 'There's too much going on. It's too busy. I don't like it...' But on the second listen, it sounds a little better... and the next time, it sounds better still. Eventually you learn to love it."
The same scribe told us that we need to be patient.
Eventually you learn to love it
Put differently, there is a formal relationship between these broken sounds and surrounding actuality: it is, however, a complex one. Patient listeners will eventually be rewarded will a coping mechanism: a sense of order - and therefore logic - is slowly revealed. There's an old Russian expression that, even today, is spoken to nervous brides. Translated literally, it becomes: "Patience results in love." It might be paraphrased as "acquiescence brings acceptance."
The same attitude is reflected in several freely available web-releases this week from electronic artists around Russia; here we introduce four of them - in ways that mirror some issues of both social and geographic consequence.
Zakhar himself (who actually prefers the spelling "Zahar") has been developing a trademark sound and specific worldview since 2006. His endurance is now crowned with a fully-fledged album from Electrosound, called - simply enough - "Thirty X." Bringing both aesthetic and musical clarity to the proceedings, it comes with a small promotional text that - when translated from the Russian - reads as follows:
"This album from Zakhar Elin includes elements of almost all the styles or tendencies that constitute modern electronic music. There's new romantic techno, the broken rhythms of dubstep, classic idm, smooth downtempo, and even upbeat electro-pop. It's all expertly combined in the form of fifteen compositions, each one an 'electro-opus."
...new romantic techno, the broken rhythms of dubstep, classic idm, smooth downtempo, and even upbeat electro-pop
There's a marked degree of irony in that final term. For all the "grandeur" implied here, the 30[eks] album actually buries anything resembling big emotion in a most dramatic fashion: hedonism and lyricism both take a beating in the following manner.
As suggested in the promo-text, Elin does indeed invoke a lot of electro-pop, full of auto-tuned dancefloor phrasing such as "You know what I want; I've got what you need." That same technology, however, itself often buried under piles of glitch, eventually warps the voice of mainstream sentiment to the point of a drunken slur. The sounds of entertainment become those of estrangement. The album as a whole, offering the broad range of electro-styles tabulated here, often questions them at the same time. As a result, the role of pleasure is rather moot.
A more extreme version of this vocal manipulation can be heard in new work from Aleksej Tarutz, shown above and best known to us as founding member of I Am Above on the Left. He has just released a series of instrumentals through the side-project of Vocal Betrayal. That moniker alone suggests a further "dampening" of expressive ability. Sure enough, the opening track on a debut release actualizes that same symbolism within minutes; it includes a barely audible, distorted monolog. Broken phrases, robbed of natural intonation, are uttered in ways that mix references to sharks, "death machines," some "hidden mass" (of medical consequence?), and an "ideal lover."
Pleasure and mortal threat are collocated in very disconcerting ways. Meanwhile, the central visual motif of a deflated bicycle tire - shown here and in other promo-shots - does little to promise escape.
The same stunted, smothered forms of expression we hear from 30[eks] are best represented by the Tarutz track "Golem." A military representative, in drunken and decelerated tones, first introduces himself and then tells us that "for any questions you can contact my golem." A mythical figure made from inanimate matter takes the place of a living leader. Life and responsibility are handed over to immobility - and then given visual form in a couple of nervous, endlessly flickering videos. With the anxious speed of strobe lights, two or three washed-out images alternate without pause, giving us no clear depiction of anything.
Estrangement is thus joined by inanimacy and stuttering inconstancy. Whatever the real-life cause of this pessimism, Mr. Tarutz feels that its consequences are widespread.
These failings are directly addressed by Novosibirsk's Eugene Kush, more specifically on a new album published through Liminal Records, "I'm Sorry." The last time we looked at his work, Kush was working with Moscow's Delete in order to investigate and then illustrate the lives of typical Russian citizens. The picture was not pretty.
"What we have before us [in these sounds] are the experiences of a simple individual, living in Russia today. He's living amid the kind of issues that people discuss with great sadness in their cramped kitchens; the sort of events that happen every day on our streets. These are, in short, the social problems that people try desperately to ignore. They do so by diving head-first into the abyss of aimless consumerism, 'weekend alcoholism,' or the endlessly anxious existence that's offered by the internet."
That civic distance or disjuncture is now furthered in the new recordings, "I'm Sorry." The title track, as with Tarutz and 30[eks], buries the remnants of lyrical expression or confident individuality in a sea of distortion. Selfhood barely surfaces - and apologizes when it does.
On his personal website, Kush produces a little more detail for us: "This album is full of my experiences from the last six months. It bears the mark of various emotions and some related changes that I've undergone... You can [still] recognize my musical handwriting here from my previous works." In other words, the style and outlook of Mr. Kush endure. He states openly that these distorted, sinking voices are the consequence or victim of social transitions. In fact, as he declared last June in even more specific terms, they're a consequence of the "troubled dissolution of the Soviet Union - and of the social catastrophe that followed."
[Sounds born] of the troubled dissolution of the Soviet Union - and the social catastrophe that followed
Those transitions are not the only cause of the alienation documented here; physical geography doesn't help, either. Another Liminal release this week comes from very far away - the small city of Abakan in southern Siberia. In the 19th century, Abakan was a place of exile for troublesome citizens; dispatched by wagon or train across many time zones, they were then forced to work endlessly in dangerous coal mines. Not until the 1930s was this stockade and penal zone designated as a town, even.
Here we find the musician known as Medkit (aka Denis Borisovich). The southern Siberian rail system of today still considers Abakan the end of the line; consequently - and not surprisingly - simplicity and solitude are prominent factors of daily life here. How does Medkit arrange his creative affairs, for example? "Basically, I write music using a computer, a dictaphone, and my head!... Whatever emerges as a result will fall easily enough into the framework of 'idm.'" His new album, "Not for Summer," suggests that the same sounds probably have some additional, melancholy resonance.
A distance from warmth and domestic welcome is immediately foregrounded.
That shift begins with a little insecurity and self-correction, as he reconsiders his commitment to idm: "On the other hand, from a rhythmic point of view, some things I do are closer to dubstep - with elements of ambient, too. Bits of other styles might be in there, even."
A small-scale, fragmentary form of expression does not lend itself to any one confident category. Tarutz's flickering videos and the endless stutter of 30[eks]'s glitch seem to be mirrored very far from home. Just as Tarutz's incandescent image above suggests, if something is indeed wrong with the social fabric, the problem is both widespread and serious.
In avoidance of any societal strife, Mr. Borisovich makes some more admissions about his quiet habits and preferred company: "I like cats - in fact, animals in general. Including toads. People, too. I like to read and am especially fond of Hans Christian Andersen. I'm interested in history, literature, music, and fairytales. And music [again]... and so we go around in circles."
...and so we go around in circles
The music, in other words, becomes an almost mantra-like form of consolation. It's a superior, though insistently uttered alternative to the noise that drowns out voices of idiosyncrasy and independence in Kazan, Moscow, and even Berlin, where Aleksej Tarutz currently lives. Social and physical distance seemingly give rise to intrusive white noise: the further, the louder. Frequently produced harmonies and the company of cats are, not surprisingly, a more desirable option. With a collection of fairytales, just to keep the spirits up.
In the world of Medkit, where nineteenth-century exiles once languished, "people" come to mind only after cats, "animals in general," and toads. Time, perhaps, to take those Danish fairytales and head for the railway station, although from the viewpoint of many Abakan residents (as we see below), the trains don't appear to be going anywhere in particular.
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