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Vstrecha Ryby ("Fish Meeting," Chelyabinsk/Moscow)
The band known as "Vstrecha Ryby" (Fish Meeting) are originally from the industrial city of Chelyabinsk. Given, however, the musicians' growing renown in the Russian capital, newer listeners might presume them to be a direct outgrowth of the Moscow scene. Whatever the case, this upwards shift from one city to another did not occur with any haste. Quite the opposite, in fact. The frontman of Vstrecha Ryby, Ivan Kotikhin (front row, right) - together with pianist Pavel Dubrovin - first began experimenting back in 2005. The recent picture above, showing the entire band and some colleagues, now looks back on those years of "hard labor" with a smile.
By the artists' own admission, their earliest inspirations were Portishead and Tricky, together with the verse of Joseph Brodsky: the first two reference points have apparently been outgrown. Now things are a little different - and less generically rigid. "In recent times, the group has become a powerful collection of creative, free-thinking individuals; these are the kind of people who do not fear their own paroxysms, thought processes, words, or sounds." That brave and promising engagement of spontaneous outburst will prove to be important.
No fear of one's paroxysms, thought processes, words, or sounds
This seemingly nervous aesthetic, as we've noted before, is sometimes attributed to other, non-musical sources, too, both domestic and international. They include Woody Allen, Anton Chekhov, Vladimir Maiakovskii, Radiohead, Petr Mamonov, David Lynch, Aleksandr Vertinskii, and many, many others… Thankfully, this eclecticism has not lessened and continues to operate through the group's documented tools of "Voice, keyboards, drums, a bass guitar, violin, a saxophone, and a trumpet." A similar jumble of reference points now comes together for some new recordings, the collective artwork of which implies that willful variety can lead to some very impressive transformations indeed.
Vstrecha Ryby: "Nedolgo"
Put differently, the band's wantonly dramatic, free-flowing manner has given rise to an album entitled "Nedolgo" (i.e., "Not [For] Long"). It can be downloaded for free from a number of locations and deserves some serious support. These eleven compositions, spanning thirty-five minutes, are further proof of Vstrecha Ryby's unique flair for anxious enterprise. The best insight into this kind of productive trepidation comes, arguably, from interviews... which are unfortunately few and far between. At least one example in the Russian press sheds some light upon the production and raison d'etre of "Nedolgo."
Here we discover, for example, Kotikhin's experience whilst working on the album - both as a doctor and waiter. The need to make a basic living has led him to some extremely varied venues. Moral support along this wavering, sometimes faltering trajectory comes from the wise words of Goethe, somewhat surprisingly. Kotikhin is especially fond of one quote, attributed to the same author, declaring that life's true path can only be mapped through a difficult marriage of skill, passion, and long-term commitment... come what may. Dedication, in other words, must operate beyond the safe limits of habit.
Other sensible goals, such as a stable wage, must fall by the wayside. Even now Kotikhin is obliged to combine his songwriting with uninspiring, though necessary employment in a pharmaceutical company.
Ivan Kotikhin and Maria Koroleva
In a related context, most members of Vstrecha Ryby are professionally trained graduates of Russia's conservatories who've also had to make sobering sacrifices. Kotikhin noted recently that the band is made wholly of "outsiders" since "there are no Muscovites in Moscow any more." The entire capital seems full of hopeful provinicial dreamers - and the difficult compromises required to fuel that reverie.
It's useful to recall that Kotikhin has a special fondness for the equally tense lyricism of St. Petersburg's SBPCh, whose catalog is made from fast, nervously-delivered tales of urban existence. It's precisely the verbal aspect that is most appealing here - and once more an enduring love for Brodsky's verse shines through. Just as some the "VR" tracks are wholly textual, delivered over a background drone, so Kotikhin feels that the poetic aspect of modern Russian songwriting gets insufficient attention. It therefore needs to be foregrounded with striking, even disconcerting insistence, despite the fact that several of the songs on "Nedolgo" admit the insufficiency of speech. The philosophical necessity and paucity of language is foregrounded.
Place some coins upon my eyes and send me downstream...
The very tool with these artists try to make sense of experience is simultaneously lauded and yet lacking. Take, by way of example, the well-known song "Volk" (Wolf) on this new album. Its depiction of the near future is not pretty - it defies description. In a word, life begins to look unspeakable - in several senses. Hence the dark humor in these lyrics, mocking themselves as they progress. "A wolf's already at the door. (Just as we sang in the last track...) Place some coins upon my eyes and send me downstream... I'll sing your song with a crappy motif, a bad motif, a cheap motif..."
This challenge of - or struggle with - speech continues in other conversations with the Russian press (whilst Goethe's spirit floats somewhere in the background). Not long ago, Kotikhin declared: "I always think the words are most interesting [in a band's output], but almost nobody pays attention to them nowadays. I certainly don't understand why Russian groups would want to sing in English." Who, therefore, answers to this domestic challenge best of all? "Auktsyon are absolutely everything [for us]." That St. Petersburg band, by good fortune, also has a collection of new songs, which will be available for download in a few days. There's much to connect these two groups, despite their differences in age and address.
Ivan Kotikhin: 'Auktsyon are absolutely everything'
We've written often in the past about the endeavors of lead singer Leonid Fedorov with colleagues Vladimir Volkov or Sergei Starostin, but the new recording comes from Auktsyon as a whole. Founded long ago in 1978, this northern ensemble is often lumped into a "post-punk" category by Western observers, but the connections of Auktsyon with folk tradition offer a more meaningful avenue of investigation. As we'll see, authorless improvisation is certainly a more important aspect of the band's modus operandi - and with that assumption in mind, the parallels with Vstrecha Ryby begin to seem justifiable.
The ensemble's name - allegedly - comes from a half-forgotten mispronunciation; likewise, the musicians were famously maligned during the late 1980s for a formless, "degenerate style of performance that merely discredits the heritage of Russian rock." It's this commitment to a frenetic, almost schizophrenic manner on stage that has prompted other publications in the US to draw parallels with Jacques Brel or, once things speed up, Pere Ubu. Inspired absurdism takes the place of academic enterprise.
Trying to bring order to the proceedings, Tom Waits, Gogol Bordello, Radiohead, and other comparisons are sometimes encountered in the anglo-press. None, however, seem wholly appropriate for a collective that dedicates its newest material to a playground object of constant, nervous movement. Put differently, these eleven songs of "degenerate" musing are entitled "Iula," a Russian noun that can refer to a child's spinning top, a fidgety adult, or a small song bird. Similarly, the views of reality and/or experiences documented in these often senseless stories do not lead to any comforting stability. The further a narrative develops, the greater we sense the divide between storytelling and sense. Language merely displays its own inadequacy as it tries to scribe patterns of cause and effect. Yet still our chatter continues...
It's this worrying, yet necessary commitment to an insufficient medium that also colors some interviews with Fedorov of late.
And why not improvise? Especially if you've already played the material once before...
Bearing in mind his associations with both traditional and improvised performance, Fedorov has been wary of relying too much on his own back catalog for shows. He has praise for an ad-libbed aesthetic, whatever the risks. "I can sympathize with Beethoven, who used to hate playing his own music. He'd invite some pianist or other to come and play his own, well-known works in a concert setting. And then, only after the intermission, would he sit down at the piano himself - and improvise. And why not improvise? [Especially if] you've already played the material once before..."
Hence the appeal of accelerating deviations from custom.
Snowballing experience both prompts and undermines reactions to it - time and time again. How then, to avoid the paltry limitations of time-honored, rule-bound form?
"The compositions still played in Auktsyon's repertoire [after all these years] leave room for freedom... I prefer the kind of 'open' music that allows you to play it differently - each time. So that's not 'composed' material, strictly speaking. Folk music, for example: I think that's better than anything especially 'made up.' Folk music is open from the outset. You can build an entire symphony from a single folk song..."
Music for me has always been an opportunity to do things improperly
Improvised expression knows no stopping point - if we're to realize the kind of romantic maximalism we hear above from Goethe. As Fedorov said recently: When I write something, I'm of course interested in the result, but that's not the main thing. I like the process more... Music for me has always been an opportunity to do things improperly. That's why I use all kind of dissonances, discordant sounds and so forth, but I don't use the computer to adjust my voice. If some kind of cock-up fits the context of a song, then it should absolutely stay there. For me, music is what's happening now."
And so the "spinning top" or dizzying relationship between experience and fixed, formulaic speech will produce all manner of results - some of which are apparently moribund, if we're to judge the skeletal artwork of "Iula." Only, it seems, through the death of convention will some metaphorical "openness" emerge. Such is the logic behind Fedorov's celebration of effort, failure, and - therefore - discovery.
He then goes on to draw connections between his songs and folk ritual. "Music arose for a reason," he begins by stating. It emerged in order to express and maybe evoke the formless, shifting promise of some magical state that's grander that mundane experience. That same promise, however, will only be realized through a transgression of normalcy. The uncanny demands a very strange register indeed. Perhaps not surprisingly, the conversation then turns to shamanistic practice, to the oldest, most inspired, and truly transformational utterances of all... which in turn bring us back to the semi-serious Christological motifs of the Vstrecha Ryby artwork.
Music arose for a reason
Both of these new recordings from Vstrecha Ryby and Auktsyon are attributed by their creators to a timeless tension between formal expression and what - perhaps - lies beyond its conventions. The former ensemble mocks its own lyrics; Auktsyon's frontman speaks with great respect of a shamanistic promise that will only be realized at the very edge of common sense. Vstrecha Ryby's viewpoint is productively subversive; Fedorov then embraces that same loss of stability. After all, "Iula," on the heels of Fedorov's recent work with "trans-rational" poetry of the 1920s, is a veritable carnival of alliteration and assonance, all in search of coincidences between life and the lexicon. Where words fail, the unspeakable begins.
Some fitting, ephemeral overlap might be found between life and language... but then, as Fedorov says, "why not improvise?" Through risk, error, and failure, other semantic opportunities open. The first step is to admit the insufficiency of convention, full of "crappy motifs." And so efforts continue in celebration of artistic brinkmanship, since - in the words of Kotikhin's favorite Russian writer, Brodsky: "A poet's credo or doctrine is not the point of arrival. It is, on the contrary, [only] a point of departure for some metaphysical journey."
Ivan Kotikhin, Vstrecha Ryby
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