|
Last week some very quiet sounds appeared from the Estonian capital of Tallinn; they were attributed to a young man known as Ahti Arumetsa. Full of ambient, sometimes white noise and glitchy interruptions, these barely audible instrumentals - "Summer at Your Home" - seemed to be poised on the very edge of self-erasure: they spoke more of absence than of presence. And indeed, that impression of some stuttering exit is justified twice over. These compositions are both dedicated to a past, half-remembered summer and connected, in related professional terms, to a musical project that no longer exists.
Taken en masse, these five tracks, with a running time of almost seventeen minutes, were penned last year, yet they never made their way onto hard media (in any meaningful fashion), due to problems with both packaging and suitable artwork. Only fifty-two CDs were pressed - all in a domestic setting - and then "given away in California[...]." At least the issue of appropriate cover art has been resolved, in that these five mp3s now come with an evocative photograph of (what appears to be) some faintly lit, Asian fabric chosen from the portfolio of Kaisa Laurimaa.
An aspiring, minimalist project... which is no longer active
Early plans had been to release this music through Arumetsa's small ensemble known as "Roman Boys and Girls"... but that project doesn't exist any more, either. And so a handful of light, airy, and withdrawn sounds reach us from an "aspiring, minimalist project... which is no longer active due to other aspirations and quests. If you have ever listened to our music, then 'Thank You.'" Arumetsa's musical sketches come into being as an audible embodiment of incipient desire - and then vanish as other, more recent and fickle whims turn their author's attention elsewhere.
Constancy is barely evident, as busy hands move from one short-lived endeavor to another - all in the ongoing attempt to evoke time's swift passage.
A little context helps to flesh out these impressions of fragility and evanescence: "The EP was inspired by late summer evenings and some 'Farewells' to those friends I've had the joy and honor of knowing over the years. It's also a 'Thank You' to [other] acquaintances who've endured the strange progress of our relationship."
An accelerated, louder, and more nervous expression of transience came to us a few months ago from the Moscow glitch artist Tim Ballista. He is another solo performer unlikely to indulge in wordy PR, in fact he's explicitly framed by his sometime label - Illphabetik - as an exponent of tight-lipped, "dark atmospheres and related sound design. Ballista tells stories about form[al change] and spatiotemporal journeys. He describes all that he sees with both speed and [manifest] volume." There's no time for idle chatter amid the stuttering, often disorienting mosaics that characterize Ballista's worldview.
A world full of unseen creatures - and unknown forces
In short, these are compositions dedicated to quick-fire, borderline chaotic alteration. As the folks at Illphabetik explain, this sometimes leads to a related shift from idm to some frenzied aspects of breakcore. Glitch morphs into grander forms of rapid evolution. The earlier sounds we examined from this performer "showed the relationship between one person and the inherently 'glitchy' world around him." And what did those lively, flickering noises represent? "A world full of unseen creatures - and unknown forces."
Amid broken, disconcertingly kinetic, and sometimes "monstrous" clamor, an individual works hard to establish some kind of stable algorthim. If the audible pressures of actuality are inherently ineffable (i.e., they cannot be spoken of), then perhaps they might - at least - be forced into other enduring and therefore consoling patterns.
It can be tiring work. Inexplicably so.
Tim Ballista (Moscow)
Now we have some new recordings on offer from Ballista, gathered both as a solo mini-CD ("Thing Scape") and as a spilt recording with Moscow's harsh noise artist Razxca (also the subject of our attention before). Rather than repeat our own prior musings, it's more useful on this occasion to suggest some ways in which Ballista and Razxca might be combined or conflated - at least with an overlapping philosophy. What, in other words, is the relationship between these men and their sounds of anxiety (Ballista) or utter collapse (Razxca)?
Razxca, we're told or reminded, "has been writing music for about ten years, releasing numerous albums of field recordings, ambient- and micro-noise worldwide. As an artist of free [sonic] forms, he reconstructs his emotional experience as patient, violent, and hypnotic tunes, using only the most basic [or "minimalist" equipment] - a tape recorder and the demo version of an extremely simple sequencer."
Music that's patient, violent, and hypnotic
Three adjectives buried within that paragraph are the most revealing: "patient, violent, and hypnotic." Taken together, those modifiers imply that there's very little difference between expectation, (worrying) disorder, and the troubling rhythms therein. Anxiety, breakdown, and attempts at reconstruction all happen at the same time! If the hushed, though limping melodies of Ahti Arumetsa sketch their flickering forms on the edge of silence (i.e., absence), then Razxca's noisier contributions are directly informed by frightening attempts - over and over - to discern rhythmic order on the edge of massive, disorienting excess.
"Nothing" and "everything" (nowhere and everywhere) are seen in very similar terms, i.e., as worrying plenitude. Metaphors of isolation and desolation become synonymous.
Tim Ballista: "Thing Shape" (2011)
So, for that reason, Tim Ballista's contribution is viewed as an intent, demanding "focus upon the reconstruction of surrounding sounds into dramatic, beat[-heavy] structures." From within harsh noise, with considerable, almost vertiginous effort, there emerge some elements of breakcore: this is the soundtrack to desperate activity.
It's interesting to note, against this splintered, spinning backdrop, that the Ballista recordings are informed by the novels of Ursula Le Guin, whose science fiction has been endlessly inspired by themes of some future search, far from Earth, for ethnic, sexual, and political harmony. Her father, in fact was an academic who studied what Le Guin calls the "wreckage of cultures and ruination of languages, all smashed by a monoculture." Both those sci-fi stories and the Ballista/Razxca split ponder the monumental, intrepid effort involved in making stable sounds or statements amid those ruins. As a "monosystem" falls away, disorientation looms, each and every day.
Plenty of religious allusions - and a mere sprinkling of love songs...
Related worries of societal and/or existential collapse were part and parcel of the 2011 summertime EP published by Moscow's Purple Eve, a sextet fronted by the female duo of Yano Yano and Ave Yassen. Entitled "Submersus" and produced on a DIY basis, those earlier recordings were dedicated to "grim tales of drowning and harsh words of censure, spoken just before a suicide in the watery abyss... Plenty of religious allusions [were on display] - with a mere sprinkling of love songs..."
Purple Eve (Moscow)
That evocation of widespread worry continued in a related text: "Purple Eve decided to place their guitars aside and show themselves in a totally different genre. Not long ago, the Moscow entertainment magazine 'Afisha' defined their style as 'gothic pop-rock.' Now, though, both pop and rock have faded into the background. That change in emphasis has allowed the band to transform itself entirely - and become the embodiment of gothic ambient." Those final two words imply an overarching sense of doom and demise, together with a strangely aesthetcized sense of surrender to its (hidden) threat. Stress reaches the point where acquiescence looks a more appealing option.
The embodiment of 'gothic ambient'
And now, through the assistance of the Melodica netlabel, five of those "Submersus" tracks have been reconsidered, retouched, and rereleased. The predominant themes of demise and quietus, however, endure... in ways that are packaged more as pleasure: "Do you want to explore an unknown underwater world? If so, then let's 'submerge' into the depths of electronica... This Purple Eve release floats along in ways suggestive of a natural, though melancholy current. At some point those acoustic waves morph into pure, female vocals..."
"Harmonious" acquiescence with one's surroundings seems possible only through surrender - to the waters of the Styx. Amid the "wreckage of cultures and ruination of language" only surrender - or irreversible decadence - offers a bona fide, valid alternative to the endlessly panicked sounds that emanate from Ballista and Arumetsa. The end of summer presages the end of everything(!), envisioned as the watery - and yet elegant - demise we see below. Willful surrender is more dignified than constant fear.
Purple Eve: "Submersus EP" (2011)
Comments
Login / Register