In a range of new recordings from Moscow, Yekaterinburg, and Chelyabinsk, aimlessness comes to the fore. These young musicians have scant faith in social progress: "uselessness" becomes their goal.
The need for young musicians to hold down a couple of jobs can be trying. Related material complications lead, over time, to a celebration of immaterial values, such as wistfulness and a slacker ethos.
As these performers list the professional or political obstacles facing their work, a nostalgia develops for intuitive, pre-adult experience. Those earliest years harbored some nameless values.
The St. Petersburg community known as "We Are Russians" is busy gathering electronic projects with a special fondness for the 1980s. The soundtrack to perestroika continues to have great relevance.
A number of publications this week display an interesting tension between grand romance and self-deprecation. By understating their heartfelt values, these artists stress a stubborn fidelity to a fading cause.
Several new jazz and instrumental releases find good reason to celebrate complexity or surprise. They all share a desire to avoid the predictable crudity of commerce, mass media, and modern politics.
Hoping to develop their careers in a meaningful fashion, these bands consider writing uplifting or consoling love songs. Reality, however, unfolds in strange ways and fosters a less optimistic outlook.
As performers make plans for the future, a tension arises between subjective desire and public crudity. The best way to foster hope (again) is to leave those heartless civic realms behind.
Four new recordings across Russia turn to the landscape for inspiration. While the natural world proves uplifting, mankind's invasion of the ecosphere - for material gain - ruins any fantasy.
As Yungchen Lhamo and Anton Batagov promote a collaboration grounded in Tibetan prayers, other Russian artists have a different view of distant places. Hope and horror begin to alternate.
