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Last week, the Lithuanian net-project Mondayjazz released a new mixtape/set from Moscow beat maestro Dza. It's currently promoted, in Russian, as "a mash-up made from tracks by all kinds of hip-hop performers, both from Russia and further afield. Banging beats for ya ears!"
Indeed.
It comes as the newest contribution from the wonderful How2Make project, nicely contextualized by a handful of recent chats with Dza (aka Sasha) in the Moscow netzine Look at Me, more often than not with his friend and colleague, (Roma) Mujuice. Together these two musicians often adopt the shared moniker of Cut2Kill. The image above shows them onstage in precisely that guise.
All these creative options and combinations have been discussed from time to time in the Look at Me interviews. Below we present a snapshot of those same conversations, together with some recent tracks from both Dza (below, right) and Mujuice, shown here at home in Moscow. One of these men is coping with workplace stress much better than the other.
Asked not long ago about the raison d'etre of Cut2Kill, and indeed its name, Mujuice replied that it "refers initially to the technical aspect of sampling, whereas the second word ['kill'] means exactly what it says. In fact, it was the name of a schoolboy project of [The Prodigy's] Liam Howlett. We've never liked the fact that an ensemble we adored as kids went on to become a festival headliner, though." In other words, these two musicians have gone back to the genesis of a major musical outfit and frozen it in time, refusing to let the ham-fisted grandeur of primetime business take over.
Cut2Kill, as a result, embodies a clear-cut act of wanton "minorism." Dza and Mujuice have even referred to it as an "act of revenge against the kind of reality" that manhandles their beloved music beyond all recognition. Lo-fi, low-pixel works therefore have greater charm. They remain an expression of potential, rather than of (expensive) goals reached... and gradual disappointment. Hence, no doubt, the very tinny AM aesthetic of Dza's track offered above, "Hey, Rake," seemingly recorded on a transistor radio and then mixed over a telephone. "Cheap" and "cheerful" are the orders of the day, long before the specter of Moscow glamor casts an unseemly shadow over amateur enthusiasm.
When performing together, these musicians and their acts of cultural vengeance resemble "the kind of vibe we liked as kids... It's heavy, bad-tempered, massive-sounding, and rough." That stance may also be an act of deliberate contrariness with regard to Dza's own work at How2Make, as if Cut2Kill is a confrontational, almost self-destructive gesture, designed to clear the ground of old targets and dead wood. Thus he vacates the playing field, ready for new endeavors.
"I created How2Make five years ago... but now I don't really like the kind of people who've grown up around it." He feels as if the earliest, teenage crowds have all reached the age where they should start taking their lives and music a little more seriously - which they refuse to do.
I created How2Make five years ago... but now I don't really like the kind of people who've grown up around it.
Mujuice chips in at this point and declares that a key problem with the Russian music scene as a whole is its lack of cohesion. Individuals may have the energy and desire to begin a project, but almost nothing will ever come together in productive, functional ways. Any scene that does happen to cohere will usually fall apart with equal speed; this sad realization leads Dza to say that Russian music will only ever catch on in the West if someone's able to capture a brief, intense period of Slavic activity as it occurs - and then advertise loudly in the West ASAP, before it fizzles out at home.
Standing before Lenin's body, kept suspended for decades in a mausoleum, Dza bemoans a similar state of immobility in his chosen art form.
Producing sounds worthy of Western ears could be tricky. Dza and Mujuice both maintain, with no great glee, that "your average, run-of-the-mill US group will probably sound better than whatever a Russian major can turn out." There's a general awareness that the nation's musical evolution is terribly slow and yet, they feel, it's always hard to push things forward in Russia for one simple reason: "Underground music, by its very nature, is supposed stand in opposition to mainstream pop [and thus foster an alternative]. We don't even have real pop-music, though! All there is resembles some awful trash or other, the kind of stuff that's ten years behind everybody else. As if that wasn't bad enough, the beats those artists use are about seven years old, too..."
Surrounded by various "retarded" traditions, Dza and Mujuice have taken matters into their own hands, in several senses. The first act of direct resistance to the status quo has been Dza's new mixtape for Mondayjazz. Colleagues in Lithuania describe it as a combination of "European beats, with pointed Russian rap and even some Lithuanian dubstep. The overall sound is technically-driven, moody, and maybe even a bit aggressive. That's quite a reflection of the times we're living in, no?"
A sullen demeanor has indeed sidelined the bright lights of Moscow.
This same moody aggression has passed over into stage two of the musicians' recent endeavors, as it were: a new mix from both men entitled "Raketa Krov'" (Rocket Blood), plus some shorter compositions. It all comes, once again, under the banner of Cut2Kill and those briefer tracks now form what Dza and Mujuice would like to see, perhaps with an element of irony, as "the revival of classic rave culture! By that we mean that you'll hear, much as you'd expect, loads of synths, but without all the big mistakes [or broken rhythms], glitch and so forth." Yet again Dza explains that it's all part and parcel of their strong, shared desire to redo the festival rave environment of their childhood.
"People might reckon this is some kind of club music, but that's not really the case..." "Raketa Krov'" - offered above - is a marvelous 55 minutes of abstract hip-hop, glitch, ambient, and other sparkling adornments, yet these rave-redux tracks are indeed another ballgame altogether. Take, for example, "Mech."
A selection of these instrumentals is currently available at Soundcloud. None are longer than 6:40 and, despite the enthusiastic invitations we hear to resurrect the wall-wobbling dance tunes of a prior decade, this new material is handled with a pinch of irony, to say the least. The opening chords to some of the Soundcloud demos may begin with the kind of operatic, dramatically layered synths that would lead us to expect a trance anthem, for example, but there's enough stumbling and bumbling with the beats to suggest a tongue-in-cheek love for an old-school style that now sounds rather crude. Passions of the past are mildly embarrassing; nobody likes to take them too seriously...
As a result, what we're offered is less "four to the floor" than a series of hiccuping, hip-hop tinged instrumentals. These alleged paeans to festival anthems sound a lot more like bedroom endeavors, channeled through laptops rather than Marshall stacks.
Three cheers all round, in any case.
This constant insistence, after a few interviews, starts to adopt something of a pedagogical air. If Mujuice and Dza are so keen on fixing some failings within small-scale music culture, perhaps they'd be better off educating those poor souls who've fallen by the wayside?
And indeed this is precisely what they've done. A DIY school program has now been established, in order to teach wishful beatmakers the ropes. More specifically, we're told: "The music school Nota Stars has just opened Moscow's first course on beatmaking and turntablism. Here you'll discover how the guys from How2Make get things done. You'll learn in great detail how to use samplers, synthesizers, turntables, and various computer programs for making music. Classes will be led by the label's resident musicians Dza and Escapo."
These classes are grounded in a combination of lectures and live experience. Working, perhaps, in the same vein as Artemii Troitskii's management courses, or those of DJ Groove and his own Moscow school, the How2Make lessons begin with a broad cultural context. All manner of topics are touched upon, from various music styles to electrical know-how, and even such matters as the "psychology of the dancefloor."
Working primarily with Ableton software, the practical courses in beatmaking extend that cultural knowledge into pragmatic, technical tips and tricks. Students are allowed onto the dancefloor only after a solid historical grounding: the future should not be in the hands of those who know nothing of prior decades' "festival" aesthetic - or its failings. In the famous words of George Santayana, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." The same, it seems, is true of DJs.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
As we see below from the private collection of our two Moscow DJs, new heroes need to start small, which is why an affection for lo-fi, slightly kitschy phenomena endures. As mentioned, it's an unstudied, spontaneous affection for music - an experience from times before profits and "adult" posturing become the showbiz norm. We should expect a vigorous defense of this "minorized" outlook from both Dza and Mujuice. Musicians who take their moral benchmarks from a plastic Superman and pint-sized Lucky Luke will surely continue the good fight against costly glamur for quite some time.
They even appear to have the backing of the police.
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