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The trio known as Chikiss - named after front-woman Galia Chikiss - has released just a wonderful new EP. It marks an evolutionary stage between the handful of top-notch tracks released online over the last couple of years and an album, promised in the near future. The four-track package can be downloaded for free from Moscow's webzine OpenSpace. Once that link expires, the album may already be out and about; if not, the EP will probably remain available through Chikiss' own page at Live Journal.
In either case, we certainly recommend that second venue, since Ms. Chikiss writes both regularly and with much insight on a couple of key topics: the music scene around St Petersburg and the daily trails of raising young children. We will be focusing exclusively on the former.
We've written with much admiration of Chikiss before, offering both her music and a sketch of Primorsk, the northern coastal town from which she operates. Chikiss in fact moves back and forth between two projects in the snowy North, both as leader of the outfit discussed here and in a more experimental ensemble known as 188910 – named after the region’s postal code.
With the publication of these four new tracks, titled en masse as the "Springtime EP" (Vesenniaia EP), the band has given itself an excellent opportunity to sketch the sound and general philosophy of the 14 numbers that'll constitute the fully-fledged LP in the very near future. That larger project, the basic concept of which we discuss in this post, was rehearsed, produced, and then polished in a spacious old studio that used to belong to the Soviet recording company Melodiia.
The issue of (close and opened) space has, in fact, become key to Chikiss and their sound, as we now explain.
Of the studio, based in an old church, the band's vocalist has said this week: "I used to dream of recording in there. When it became financially possible to work in that studio - and the timetable was fixed - I jumped at the opportunity. It's such a calm place, really super. There's a grand piano, harpsichords, proper tape decks, and unbelievable acoustics. The engineers have real old-school skills. They really understand their stuff when it comes to issues of sound. I don't have that kind of experience at all."
"Then [once we started] I found out that the piano in there is the same one used by Mikael Tariverdiev when he wrote most of his beautiful soundtracks. Personally I consider him one of most brilliant Soviet composers... It was really important for me to discover those things."
Then [once we started] I found out that the piano in there is the same one used by Mikael Tariverdiev when he wrote most of his beautiful soundtracks. Personally I consider him one of most brilliant Soviet composers... It was really important for me to discover those things.
This sense of space - both architecturally and historically - is audible in Chikiss' work. The contents of the new EP illustrate her trademark melodies and piano-work, likened by some to Lithuania's Alina Orlova, but - unlike her kindred Baltic spirit - Chikiss' songs often float away into silence, with a pronounced recourse to echo/reverb. The band employs these tricks in ways that even remind us of Martin Hannett, in that the music of Chikiss frequently sounds as if it were committed to tape in a large, abandoned complex - or that it evanesces the moment it is being produced. Played with slight confidence, it begins fading almost immediately. For all the beauty of this EP, therefore, it's tinged with a sense of sadness, of being alone in a worryingly vacant domain - where statements of "unique" selfhood slip away, into the faceless past, with disarming alacrity.
As a result, the "Springtime EP" has a troubling appeal, so to speak; it attracts and unnerves at the same time, thanks both to the architecture of the Melodiia studio and Chikiss' sense of unworthiness whenever she ponders the great names of Soviet cinema, who once used the same artistic tools. Against the grand backdrop of decades of Russian music, constantly broadcast across 11 time-zones, one's own efforts can seem very small indeed.
She says, nonetheless, that "it was really important to discover those things," to define a sense of subjective minimalism amidst bigger and better issues. The echo we hear on many of the tracks is the sound of arrogance sliding inexorably, yet happily, into the distance.
In writing about this EP on her Live Journal page in the last few days, Chikiss has stressed her need to step back from the confidently experimental, psychedelic style of earlier releases, in order to adopt a type of respectful conservatism that would be more fitting in the new, storied surroundings.
"Working at Melodiia we took a more traditional route, and played more tightly-arranged songs, instead of the semi-electronic, 'watercolor canvases' we usually produce. That type of sound is very dear to my heart, but we wanted to try something else. Something more elegantly structured than what we'd normally play. It should be on live instruments, using drums, a piano, harpsichord, a Theremin... and all with those fantastic acoustics. I really think everything has worked out well. Maybe things don't sound super-duper modern, but..."
"Basically, I just hope that somebody will take these songs to heart and consider them important, maybe even a little inspiring. Something outside of time."
This is the worldview that Galia Chikiss has developed over several years, since the time she left her Belarusian hometown of Vitebsk. This sense of detachment began when her then-boyfriend moved away, "to China - forever." There was nothing to keep her at home and so the travels began. Chikiss, raised on a musical diet of "hardcore and noise" amidst friends of an anarchist persuasion, ran off to St Petersburg: "It was like running into an open field. I knew nobody in St Petersburg, except a few distant relatives."
It was like running into an open field. I knew nobody in St Petersburg, except a few distant relatives.
The most dramatic or "anarchist" act of all came from fleeing stability and moving quickly into nothingness and anonymity. This decision began, perhaps, to have creative consequences with the invention of the term "Chikiss," which is actually a nickname, taken from the post-Soviet mass murderer(!) Andrei Chikatilo. Ozeran is her actual surname.
The reasons for that odd source of inspiration are less dramatic than one might think. Chikiss' behavior in St Petersburg was "criminal" not in the legal sense, but the result of a friend noticing that she always strolled around town in a striking, norm-flouting combination of red stockings and an equally bright red sweater. That sartorial statement has a musical equivalent on the new EP, because it concludes with a number of "red" provenance: it reworks a Polish/Soviet tango about the beauty of Black Sea resorts. This joyful "Song of the South" (O Iuge) was recorded in 1936 by the Ukrainian diva, Klavdiia Shul'zhenko, shown below.
In other words, just before the most hellish year in Soviet history, marked by Stalin's purges, a song about normal romance in normal places became the most subversive act of all. Shul'zhenko's track, no matter how trivial it may have sounded, was a commitment to keep smiling, come what may.
It simply refused to submit to the surrounding horrors. Below is Chikiss' version; footage of Shul'zhenko in action from various years can be seen here.
True, the song may be the product of a Soviet recording industry that was designed on occasion to produce so-called "varnish," in order to polish over the gashes that ran through a nation's social fabric, but the same songs were then voluntarily bought, collected, and loved by the Soviet public for radically apolitical purposes. Songs of southern romance, or happy, normal anonymity were priceless in years when anybody could be deemed a figure of "special" or particular interest - and dragged off for 20+ years to a labor camp.
Chikiss' excellent new EP embodies the romance of vanishing, not only from unreliable boyfriends or vile politics, but also from the material nastiness of a city that left her circa 2000 working in awful dead-end jobs. For a while our singer was even forced to live in a squat.
In times when avaricious acquisition is the order of the day, the best, most "anarchistic" response is to walk away from ownership of all kinds. In the body of a desanctified church, claimed by a Soviet recording industry in order to make "better" music, Galia Chikiss and her band have now fashioned new sounds that are designed to slip away from selfish ownership or cocky stasis, both spatially and historically. They find inspiration in the endlessly spinning waltzes and tangos of the 1930s, together with the jazzy, lounge-like improvisations of Tariverdiev. In the dull tedium of Brezhnev's Russia, Tariverdiev's instantly recognizable music was the embodiment of unassuming, yet magical dreaming; his were the sounds of slight, yet elusive "improvisations" in realms of love and longing. This composer penned the sounds of people - maybe - exercising their will by "losing themselves" in a brief and unexpected romance.
It's was a modest goal that demanded considerable effort, all in the search for an equally simple, demure - and yet broad! - smile.
This, it would seem, is why Chikiss was/were so happy to find a Soviet piano and to cover a Soviet tango; both are forms of that culture's apolitical aspect. In other words, the music made by Shul'zhenko and her contemporaries tried terribly hard to both unearth and express an aspect of socialist promise that was devoid of politics; they tried using tales of "eternal" social parity for 3-minute stories of people who were equally in love. Fairness in society could, maybe, nurture a fairness in love... or perhaps things would even work the other way around. A story of two perfectly balanced lovers might be the start of some bigger, better grouping - in a street, a town, or even a nation. Hence the endless promise of love songs and jazzy melodies in the harshest of climates.
They offer a final hope when all else is lost; a final chance to close one's eyes and defy the grim inevitability of social logic. Such is the "anarchy" of the heart in northern towns with a tough past. Especially when people are dressed in red.
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