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This weekend sees the release of a new album from St. Petersburg's BMB, otherwise known as Beat-Maker-Beat. Discerning that link between abbreviated and full stage-names, however, is not enough - since this performer also publishes material under the moniker "Space Kid." Amid these snowballing identities, he is at least willing to reveal his Christian name: Dmitrii.
BMB claims in recent promotional materials to have been DJ-ing since the age of eleven(...) and feels that the evolution of hip-hop in Russia's "northern capital" is now both refined and clearly nuanced. So much so, that he stresses his residence within one small region of the city. He lives on the Petrograd Side, from which St Petersburg addresses first began to appear more than three centuries ago. He has - of late - also begun to talk of those same streets as his hood(!), i.e., home to a "pulsating source of fresh beats and vibes."
Petrogradskaya Storona: a pulsating source of fresh beats and vibes
These buildings cohered, it should be pointed out, as St. Petersburg's first residential region. Beyond the early palaces, administrative centers, and financial edifices, homes were also needed. The Petrograd Side, therefore, is associated with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century domesticity, rather than with any urban panache. The snapshot below shows how this district lies discernibly lower on the horizon than the churches, cathedrals, and mosques of downtown. Private experience makes no special claim to imperial grandeur.
The Petrograd Side, St. Petersburg
Our musician's efforts will, as a result, often have a discernible air of comfort, no matter his weakness for Big City swagger. Space Kid's most up-to-date biographical sketches, published this summer, backdate his earliest music to an even younger age... at ten years old; nonetheless, romance is more evident than a serious passion for hip-hop's stereotypes. Whenever Dmitrii spins tales of a precocious genius on city streets, they're colored by a sense of home and hearth.
By way of illustration, members of the press would (allegedly) contact his home in years gone by, hoping to interview a gifted youngster, only to learn from his mother that "young Dima is still at school." Nothing trumped parenthood.
Likewise, it was that same parent who began BMB's commitment to music. She had once bought herself a Yamaha synthesizer, but was unable to find the time required to practice. The instrument lay unwanted at home. While, however, she was at work, her son would instead begin twiddling; Dmitrii continued where the prior generation had stopped. (That continuity will be just as evident in the work ethic of our second musician below.)
Those early experiments have since led to a wealth of collaborations and releases, but the best or simplest introduction is through the back-catalog currently on offer at Bandcamp (we offer other links in BMB's profile). Here you'll encounter a wide range of variations rung upon the times and tunes of his favorite artists, all from the American canon: Billie Holiday, The Four Tops, Billy Paul, Leon Haywood, and others. The influences shuttle back and forth.
BMB (aka Space Kid), St. Petersburg
In giving some unity to these sounds - and therefore to an overarching worldview - Dmitrii draws upon several quotes in particular. When asked for his religious views, he states directly - if not contrarily - that "love is God in everybody." Likewise, his political outlook is offered in equally apolitical, affective terms. Empathy takes precedence over ideology. The perfect civic stance is declared to be "Love," pure and simple. Thus far, all might seem both admirable and abstract. And yet these ideas are gradually made more concrete.
They're certainly locked firmly into a musical context by his newest release: social yearning and some "otherworldly" metaphors work to mutual benefit. BMB has just collaborated with Los Angeles label Soulection in order to publish a nineteen-track, one-hour CD entitled "The Sound of Tomorrow."
BMB: 'Try living according to the spirit... and not the body'
Common ground is mapped out between the vague, yet welcoming outlook of our musician and Soulection's own raison d'etre. The label's staff view their collective name, for example, less in terms of an R&B musical heritage than as some ideal(ist) escape from urban pressures: "Everything you put out to the world starts from within - from the 'soul.' Life is also about your choices or 'selection.' It's important to have an open-minded vision - one with consistency." According to that logic, the longer one endures in such "open-minded," heartfelt charity, the greater one's social consequence. Selfhood and arrogance, however, swiftly fade into the background. Chutzpah fizzles out.
Just as BMB/Space Kid's home streets evolved from a region-wide desire for familial comfort, not for any (myth-making!) urban pomp or antagonism, so Soulection does much to avoid the cliches surrounding contemporary bass music from a huge city. A chillout aesthetic, tinged with abstract musings on immaterial values, comes to the fore. The overlap between our Slavic beatmaker and this SoCal project grows clearer still.
For that reason, although the album's title may suggest a range of stock metaphors involving technical "wizardry," we move rapidly away from all celebrations of material progress. Instead the staff at Soulection are more inclined to speak of forthcoming years as increased inclusion, not linear progress. "The future is ours" - pure and simple.
And, from the streets of St. Petersburg, we discern general agreement: "The work of BMB offers a both a unique sound and view of music. Both are constantly evolving. His works are more than hip-hop. BMB's life is, similarily, more than simply [a process of] breathing..." Material experience, please step aside. Loftier values are present.
Clapan (Denis Korsunskii, Krasnodar)
A related philosophy is evident in the new album "Telemetria" from Krasnodar's Denis Korsunskii aka Clapan. The rhetoric of future experience comes immediately into view from Clapan's southern label, Passage (itself a subsection of Fuselab): "This is an explosive mixture of techno, electro, dub, ambient, idm, and other futuristic forms of modern electronic music. The eleven tracks will turn your space-time continuum into an intricate kaleidoscope..." No sooner have we started than the pathos inherent in such phrasing leads us to imagine a light authorial smile.
Strange reincarnations and black holes, plus rainbows of all sizes and colors
Sure enough, some additional background reveals that Mr. Korsunskii is no cocky or overfunded champion of technological wish-fulfillment. Instead we discover the romance of imagining better, kinder years - to the sound of sometimes insufficient instruments. Times yet to come are envisioned from a DIY workbench, as a result of which science gives way to fiction - and happily so. "Denis creates his own worlds. They're diverse in nature, vibrant, full of strange reincarnations and black holes, plus rainbows of all sizes and colors. They embody any metamorphosis you might dare to imagine." Dreams endure where a toolbox fails.
Again these turns of phrase have little to do with concrete material gain. As with BMB and Soulection, the future is imagined as a flight from physicality. Despite the relatively young age of everybody at Passage, this creative terminology - especially that of "daring metamorphoses" - is more than suggestive of Soviet animation. The same cut-and-paste aesthetic is undoubtedly employed on many of their Kuban releases. Reverie and a bare-bones craft develop side by side.
Clapan, "Telemetria"
In Passage's abstract celebration of "Telemetria," the future is visualized as a collage of shifting forms and colors impossible in ostensible experience. It's in this vivid realization of fantasy that the parallels emerge with cartoons of prior decades. Socialist animators, year after year, created a future rich in social change, hope, and "risky" metamorphoses, all of which were logistically impossible. Those same little films, soundtracked to dreamy motifs, imagined the full - and therefore unrealizable - potential of revolutionary aspiration. Through yarns of forest spirits, witches, and wizards, countless metaphors of future alteration (and amelioration) were made briefly, tantalizingly real. Magic and improvization concurred with - and yet outstripped - policy. They kept going.
Clapan/Denis began a similarly dreamy path early on. His leaning towards generic experimentation manifested itself quickly: "Denis began to amaze his elders even in kindergarten, when they'd ask him to perform all kinds of songs. Grown-ups would play a live musical accompaniment, while Denis would use his voice to imitate any instrument at all. He would do this on request."
Korsunskii was, it is worth mentioning, raised in a family of electrical engineers. Even his grandfather had shown similar acumen, decades before. He had once been commissioned by the Soviet government to make a device that would play a Shostakovich melody every fifteen minutes at certain war memorials. In some locations, the same technology still plays to this day. It's a longed-for harmony that endures beyond the limits of material experience. It plays into a future, orchestrating that which should be.
Getting fantasy to synchronize with fact can, after all, be very difficult.
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