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The city of Orenburg was founded in the 18th century as Russia began expanding towards Central Asia. This position on a national periphery led, not surprisingly, to various clashes with ungrateful neighbors. Most famously, the region was witness to the Pugachev rebellion of the 1770s, which destroyed a considerable amount of local property... As future decades led to greater stability, though, Russia would once again head south; that second wave of expansion began the gradual establishment of Orenburg as a major center for both trade and transport in the form of railway networks.
The city's distant location, perched today on the edge of Kazakhstan, is home to Al'bert Khasanov, shown below and otherwise known as Damscray. Attempts in the Russian press to describe his work have produced the following:
...a rich, rather sombre and atmospheric sound
"This is a mixture of seemingly incompatible samples and intricate melodies with a heavy breakbeat. It's all added to more electronic elements, such as some deep basslines. The result is a rich, rather sombre, and atmospheric sound."
Now in his early twenties, Khasanov claims to have been experimenting since the age of twelve, when he first collected obscure tracks and other appealing sounds. These included samples taken from avant-garde or jazz music, snippets of dialog from art-house cinema, the clamor of "trashy" cartoons, and the windswept accompaniment to old Westerns. The resulting sonic scrapbook has met with approval from listeners in the UK and US.
"This is most definitely dark, or perhaps that should be 'unnerving.' We've got the heavy, brooding beats seen in his [earlier] work giving way to a more maniacal form of discomfort..." The result is likened to the disorderly, though inspired efforts of some "crazed scientist" who dispatches monstrous figures into the world. Graceless bodies are imagined to be "lurking around an industrial estate... in order to hunt you down with an iron bar."
[The sound of monsters] lurking around an industrial estate... in order to hunt you down with an iron bar
These noises are certainly what underscored Damscray's earliest works, published through the Dutch netlabel Humanworkshop. The Frankenstein aesthetic was clear enough. Now, however, Khasanov is hoping to move his music closer to the dancefloor, both in solo releases and as half of Krasnoyarsk's Demokracy. "The compositions are becoming harder, more danceable, and varied, too. That can lead to halfstep experiments with a somber rave sound - or it might produce industrial garage, even some trendy juke/footwork tracks..."
The choices can be bewildering.
This promenade around the style manual has led to loud approval on local streets. The Orenburg press has spoken of Khasanov as "an absolutely uncompromising" performer. Lest that sound a little partisan, we could also find related kindness in some UK webzines. "[Damscray's work comes in] a package that fuses bastard hiphop with anything and everything - from digitized squiggles to plump sawtooth bass lines."
A fusion of bastard hiphop with anything and everything - from digitized squiggles to plump sawtooth bass lines
Bearing all that in mind, we turn to a wonderful new album from Wols, otherwise known as Krasnodar's Evgeny Shchukin and Alexander Tochilkin (below) - who regularly perform within Modul, subject of much attention on FFM. Thanks to the generosity of German label Pingipung, we have an advance copy of the "Unframe" CD that will be ready for publication next month.
Approximately the same age as Damscray, Tochilkin and Shchukin extend the logic of his music, which Pingipung describe enthusiastically as sounds "situated on the boundary of dubstep and electronica." This talk of an "unframed" aesthetic and movement across various boundaries begins with a rejection of clarity. Unfocused cameras become part of an audiovisual manifesto.
The occasional inclination of "Unframe" towards dubstep's growling resonance has already popped up in the rhetoric used by Wols and colleagues to promote the new Jumble project, itself merging several southern netlabels into the collective form of FUSElab. "In our Jumble releases... soft, transparent textures are interwoven with broken rhythms and a synthetic crunch. It's all accompanied by juicy chunks of low-frequency dub electronica."
...juicy chunks of low-frequency dub electronica
This seemingly random or unfocused grab-bag of styles does have a rationale, one that furthers the connection with Damscray. We should start by explaining that the stage name "Wols" has two declared points of origin. Firstly, it is the adjective "slow" spelled backwards, and thus a celebration of dubstep's unhurried, steady pace, itself designed to distinguish the music from, say, the frantic tempo of D&B.
Secondly, "Wols" refers directly to the pseudonym of German painter Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze (d.1951). Personally acquainted with both Sartre and de Beauvoir, he became sufficiently interested in existentialism to attempt depictions of the subconscious in his imagery. The emptiness of actuality, engaged spontaneously, became an enduring object of attention.
The result was not comforting.
And this is where the matter of dubstep returns. As a style growing in popularity with Russian and other Slavic netlabels, it actively employs the emptiness of dub - primarily by removing the human voices, harmony, and anything else that happens to sit between the bass and treble registers.
As we mentioned a few days ago, dubstep was introduced to a UK audience as something sounding "so empty it makes you nervous." When the style then debuted in NY clubs, people were unsure how to react. The tempo was slow, the number of referenced styles was high, and the bass-lines seemed to melt solid walls. Disorientation was the key response. The only movement applicable to finding oneself in the middle of nowhere was a disorderly one: "people began recklessly flailing their limbs."
People began recklessly flailing their limbs
Tochilkin and Shchukin give a demonstration below.
Both Damscray and Wols mirror these nervous liberties through the theory and current practice of dubstep. It's a style that both employs emptiness and then instigates a tension between catharsis and worry. The soundtrack to an echoing, dub-filled emptiness leads to freedom and fear simultaneously - and thus invites another parallel with our German painter.
Schulze would often structure his compositions according to principles of randomness, thus hoping to give ostensible expression to pure spontaneity. His approach led, in turn, to the kind of worrying canvas we see above. There's a good reason why Schulze would go on to illustrate works by Kafka.
Spontaneously waving a paintbrush and "recklessly flailing one's limbs" are, in this instance, reponses born of the same impulse: a desire to ("slowly!") investigate the scale of an existential purview. One of the Wols tracks on the new album is called "Bathyscape Finds a Music Box"; the musicians conduct most of their work on antique Soviet synths. This album, therefore, is the soundtrack to an unbounded, "unframed" social engagement. The kind of immersion in universality that remains both enticing and unnerving, even after it failed on a massive scale twenty years ago.
These, in other words, are the sounds of tentative involvement with the outside world. Damscray's Western fans liken that engagement to a bleak industrial estate inhabited by some Frankenstein-like monster. The question, therefore, is whether the larger figure shown below might be trusted. Our answer will dictate whether we interpret these sounds as dub or dread.
It will also determine whether we should open our arms, wave them around recklessly, or drop the flowers and run away.
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