Four new dance releases from around the Russian capital seek an escape from the daily grind. Increasingly, however, a pessimistic view of the future makes prior decades an attractive reference point.
A few weeks ago in May, the Siberian city of Omsk hosted a festival of street art entitled "Spaces of Multiplicity" A regional sound artist quickly planned a celebration of noise in a pedestrian underpass.
For Western observers, many locations across a Russian map - with unpronounceable names and windswept railway stations - can appear unimaginably distant. In one of those lonely places we find SV Hutor.
The Petrozavodsk duo Love Cult have just announced they'll be writing one track each day - for an entire year. Other new projects, such as Moscow's Rhizome, express similar forms of private industry.
2muchachos, based in the town of Cherepovets , turn the crackle and rustle of a tape-music aesthetic into the soundtrack for small-scale botanical bustle.
Sugar God (Evgeny Pozdnyakov, Moscow): "I've tried to create the atmosphere of being in outer space, or of a bird's flight. It's a combination of romantic solitude and nostalgia"
"As I was writing these Empty Patterns tracks, I imagined all kinds of empty buildings to myself. They included large and vacuous halls, in the center of which a gramophone was playing..."
Art Electronix (Krivoi Rog, Ukraine): "In most cases, our compositions are made from collages of aging, defective sounds - together with old-school drum machine beats, all in the true Detroit spirit."
New electronic recordings from a range of outlying Russian cities draw parallels between their location and local history. A sense of distance transpires, both from cultural centers and the passage of time.
Humility and understatement color a number of Russian instrumental releases. Their audible modesty is prompted by childhood memories, an eco-aesthetic, and disorienting experiences online.
