BRZB: Sounds from a Black Square. ("Spiral Factory")

The four letters "BRZB" both designate and disguise the duo of Alexei Borisov and Dmitrii Zubov.  Borisov remains a leading light in post-Soviet electronica, having become something of a legend long before 1991; consequently we've showcased his releases on a number of occasions.  For this outing, he strapped himself to a Roland TB-303, an old SH-101, and a drum machine.  Both of the Rolands are products from the early 80s.  

Borisov's machinery and reputation, therefore, still bear the marked, if not ominous undertones of socialist subculture.  Political systems come and go, but this lo-fi, industrial drone continues as a soundtrack to social (or ethical) collapse.  The uncompromisingly severe atmosphere of Borisov's discography seems especially unnerving against the backdrop of today's bling.  

It's an accusatory noise that won't go away...

Zubov is credited with tones of a similar ilk: drone, "effects," and vocals, all enhanced with a Korg MS2000, a much more recent piece of machinery (by almost twenty years).  Together these men and their keyboards have produced a new net-release, "Spiral Factory," prefaced with an epigraph as obscure and worrying as he music:  "...Like flowers of metal and brick, dipped into milk and vinegar: simultaneously tart and sweet.  A choir of boys.  Matches from Moscow's outskirts."  

...Like flowers of metal and brick, dipped into milk and vinegar: simultaneously tart and sweet. A choir of boys. Matches from Moscow's outskirts.

These opening words are placed beside an image of suitable gloom and disorienting vagueness.

The indistinct melancholy of the epigraph is extended into longer, accompanying texts that sketch images of radio signals both growing and fading, yet never establishing long-term, permanent contact.  We're given poetic descriptions of undulating wires between radio towers - together with the weak, indistinct signals that mirror those looping shapes.  "The antennas of a dented radio tower stretch far into the distance...  the closer they are, the worse the signal."  

The prose snippets and unfocused photographs that accompany the release are all structured in the same way, designed less as a well-formed narrative than what BRZB term "notes in the margins of a web-diary, where the 'Comments' function has been completely forgotten. All 'Reviews' or reflexivity have also been consigned to oblivion, together with the emotional essence of any perceptional processes... the essence of knowledge."

What remains, according to these definitions by exclusion or deduction, is a form of flickering information, devoid of sentiment or self-awareness.  Little bits of data and no more, promising to cohere, yet never doing so - like distant radio signals, dancing on the edge of white noise.

Borisov and Zubov continue with their fractured, impressionistic jottings:   "Instead of poetry there are nothing more than individual phrases...  Some fashionable, postmodernist combinations of detached words, all able to fit on the back of a postage stamp.  They have no worth for a collector: in place of any value is the charm of a mass market, and the allure of digitization.  The ragged remains of a shabby thought, chopped and diced by machine translations."

"A cosmic industry [today] gives us the miraculous technology of making back-up copies; it's the automatic archiving of everything, as if it were all valuable and necessary."  Borisov's cynical views on society's sense of self-worth cohere in these assessments of technology's role vis a vis human sentiment.  Digital culture, he feels, erases any sense of value or hierarchy of meaning (since all data is preserved); that same culture also dismisses any respect for forms of humbling transience (because the same data - its own endless chatter - is arrogantly kept forever).  

This growing impression of a junk-yard culture would explain, perhaps, BRZB's opening metaphor of proximity and confusion.  The closer one draws to this digital data, the less one is able to discern any purpose or progress.  As we can see from these assembled images, they too appear to be small, displaced bits of visual information, suggesting neither a concrete place nor any narrative progression.  

And yet they've been created and saved forever.

At this point in the proceedings, BRZB cut-and-paste a sad and silly image into their poeticized prose (below): an elderly man atop a sculpted hobby-horse, his post-war suburban attire and gormless expression both ridiculously at odds with the horse's head, reminiscent of some village fair or medieval mummers.  

Any sense of purposeful "transport," be it physical or informational, has dissolved into tragicomedy.  We're clearly going nowhere.

The raison d'etre of this EP, therefore, is found in the future: Borisov's and Zubov's dark drone and industrial misery are an audible assessment of some state that has already been attained, yet whose true significance is only now unfolding.  Our digital dumping ground is still growing - and has a very long half-life.  

And, on that score, it's vital to note that BRZB came into existence almost seven years ago. They began studio work with relative speed and soon committed music to tape.  As a result, this EP - although it debuted this week - is, in fact, a product of work done in 2002.  All of a sudden, Borisov's and Zubov's nasty evaluation of the future becomes a direct judgment upon today. The year 2002 may have marked the start of Russia's oil boom and Moscow gilded glory for many, but it was also the year in which TV-6, the nation's last independent television station, was shut down.

No doubt because Borisov's prose-poems are so complex in Russian, only a very small part of the Top40 website that hosts this EP has been translated into English.  One of the few phrases accompanying "Spiral Factory" that we get in our own language is a description of these post-industrial sounds:  "Abstract pulse-techno, darkwave slow-motion electronica, hypnotising overdriven bass-drum manifestations, gloomy surrealistic oldschool industrial-pop, raw and brutal shapeless grindtronica."  

Abstract pulse-techno, darkwave slow-motion electronica, hypnotising overdriven bass-drum manifestations, gloomy surrealistic oldschool industrial-pop, raw and brutal shapeless grindtronica.

And that, dear readers, is how BRZB defined the suitable sounds for 2009 - seven years ahead of time. 

If Borisov and Zubov are this accurate in predicting the noises of the future, it's worrying to think what they might be writing now - as a soundscape for 2016.  If, in other words, the music in this post comes from a "black square" formed "after the primetime," as "Spiral Factory" tells us, the next installment will not be pretty.