"Fly Russia": The Social Benefits of a Wonky Worldview

The role of aggregator sites as a mapping tool in Russia is profound: widely spread webpages and activities need to be brought together in the name of public attention. And yet, if we look at the science of social networking and its psychological norms, we see that when web-based groups are formed, productivity typically increases while innovation drops.

This happens for two reasons: friends try to impress each other, whilst being increasingly unable to offer criticism, due to that growing friendship. The ideal formation, therefore, might be somewhere between anonymous solitude or creative “independence” and the dangers of group conservatism.

This problem has already arisen in early discussions of an excellent new compilation album - that appeared online only yesterday. The Italo-German net-project Error Broadcast has joined forces with Siberian webzine Gimme5 in order to showcase fifteen young musicians from all across Russia. The result can be downloaded gratis from both locations at 192 kbps or purchased in higher quality from services such as Bandcamp.

The overarching style of these tracks is "wonky," in other words they're fundamentally hip-hop instrumentals built on mid-range, “uneven or wobbly” keyboard techniques. Their time signatures are equally unpredictable.

The publishers of this new compilation, entitled “Fly Russia,” admit that after an initial ignorance of the style, young Slavic musicians have now given birth to “a sudden explosion of wonky tracks” thanks to a handful of “genuinely talented artists who sat quietly in the underground, waiting for their time to come. They waited for a chance to show themselves in all their glory!”

The genuinely talented artists sat quietly in the underground, waiting for their time to come

As mentioned, the geographic distribution of the artists' hometowns is wide. For the purposes of illustration, we’ve taken tracks from the mid-section of the compilation, in that authors of the opening compositions have been celebrated here before, namely Moscow’s Dza (Sasha Kholenko); 813 (Aleksandr Goriachev) and Pixelord (Aleksei Devianin). Likewise we’ve also paid attention to St Petersburg’s Nocow and his various endeavors, not to mention the excellent Wols from Krasnodar.

In the compilation’s central section, though, we encounter other towns and lesser-known performers: Save Slaves (Evgenii Simonenko), Appleyard (Segei Demin), Miracle Libido (Artem Riazanov), and Maguett (Dmitrii Drozdov). That quartet alone alone takes us all the way from Novgorod out into Siberia and back to the capital.

In this tentative balance between cohesion and isolation there are, oddly, some major benefits. Aggregated activity, as with any new album, draws attention to a stylistic “movement” and yet the dangers of conservatism or complacency are avoided - thanks, in Russia's case, to the impossibility of living and working together.

This same issue, in fact, was mentioned in material surrounding a recent mix done by Miracle Libido for the Lithuanian project Monday Jazz. The folks in Vilnius noted: “Recently, many DJs have tried to capture a wide range of genres and moods in their mixes. The tendency of performers to make more than a handful of those stylistic shifts [in close succession] is already something of a cliché.” The absence of stylistic cohesion is therefore just as worrying as a lack of innovation! A middle ground is needed.

For this reason, the appeal of wonky tracks is great, especially in a land where primetime media are so amazingly unadventurous. As an esthetic, wonky is built on a process of undermining that never stops; it’s a mixture of stability and the constant intrusion (or invitation, perhaps) of instability. We sense these opposites even in the album’s title: “Fly Russia.” That phrase evokes both the advertising rhetoric of a large, rock-steady corporation (or airline) and, as a slang term, the idea of '90s retro-chic and a playful subversion.

Likewise the album’s black artwork, shown at the top of this post, is pitched between cohesion and dispersion, stability and breakdown. It’s a celebration of mild inconsistency that we hear in concrete terms from a sampled monologue, taken by Simonenko from the kitsch ‘60s movie “Danger Diabolik,” a tongue-in-cheek Italian thriller. The hero (below) is the very embodiment of silly subversion, bringing brief havoc into the grey world of entrenched, inflexible organizations. He forces unsteadiness and disquiet into realms populated by greedy bankers or dishonest politicians.

It is hard to imagine a greater champion of “wonkiness”(!) or a more appealing compilation, since "Fly Russia" is based on swift surprise, endlessly broken beats, and – therefore – a kind of ironic sedition. After all, dancing's tough when you're in a bad mood.