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When electronic musicians from Belarus are interviewed, they tend to make at least passing observations about the health of their chosen genre nationwide. Wishing to draw attention both to their own work and the efforts of colleagues, they are keen to engender a sense of shared activity - and responsibility, too. For this reason, a new compilation from Minsk netlabel Foundamental is worth a great deal of attention; it draws together many of these artists and therefore, with happy inevitability, becomes a kind of manifesto for Belarus electronica as a whole.
Speaking immediately to this issue, the CD comes with a small introductory text in Russian. "Until very recently, nobody ever thought there was an electronic scene in Belarus. And indeed, there isn't one! It's nothing more than a modern-day kind of rhythm, a shadow cast by clouds." Immediately we doubt the seriousness of any insistence that a Belarus scene is non-existent; the tone of these opening lines suggests that a kinship does exist, yet it would rather shy away from any loud or fixed sense of obligatory membership.
Until very recently, nobody ever thought there was an electronic scene in Belarus. And indeed, there isn't one! It's nothing more than a modern-day kind of rhythm, a shadow cast by clouds.
In that case, what purpose does this compilation serve?
"The album is made of tracks from several veterans of Belarusian electronica, together with music from new and upcoming projects, too. In this regard our friends from Riga [in neighboring Latvia] have helped us to erase any fixed borders around the project." Friendship is thus playing a more important role than passports as a unifying metaphor. And, since distant friends often collaborate on virtual or web-based projects, "soundscapes" become more important than ostensible landscapes. Enterprise is fashioned digitally more than it's limited by physical or political geography.
"The soundscapes of this compilation will gently embrace the listener. From time to time, in the name of various nuances, an unobtrusive rhythm can also be heard. This CD, rich in feeling, indicates the limitless expanses of our musical endeavors [as electronic artists] - something that has been forgotten of late. Everything here has a warm, almost domestic aura, without any pushy forms of excess. This is nothing more than an initial contact. Everything still lies ahead of us."
That first engagement, as the CD's title states quite clearly, is a "Mental Contact." Once again, kindred thoughts become the basis of teamwork, rather than physical co-presence. If so, then can we perhaps take some of these musicians' thoughts, either from erstwhile interviews for this site or from current PR blurbs, and sketch the nature of that same, shared mental contact? Even if the people at Foundamental are not wildly keen on labeling the key, "stable" elements of Belarusian electronica, maybe their musicians will do the job for us? Below we offer a snapshot of each of the compilation's thirteen contributors - as "team members," so to speak.
The album opens with a number from i/dex (shown below); within 3 seconds it manages to set the perfect tone. What sounds - initially - like a protracted note from a church organ is quickly complicated by a little glitch insert, and then the synthesized sounds of a windy, open expanse. All notions of internal (closed) or external spaces are immediately confused; these sounds belong nowhere in particular and are therefore keen to undercut aspirations to - or accusations of - "ecclesiastical" pomp.
I/dex, rather than attributing his music to a set location, style, or credo, is happier stating that it "sounds like fresh spring air."
Looking at this musician's work a few months ago, we explained that i/dex is the pseudonym of Vitaliy Harmash, a remarkable musician from the Belarusian town of Novopolotsk. Harmash began playing music at a very young age. Some of his first memories involve dabbling with his father’s guitar or “twiddling the knobs on some DIY effect-boxes.” By the early 1990s he was starting to commit these random outings to tape, working initially with synthesizers, drum machines, field recordings, and radio noises. Only recently has all this heavy industry moved to the more portable confines of a laptop.
In developing his creative work, Harmash claims to be influenced by a wide range of phenomena, very few of which are connected to canonical forms of music. He has special praise and gratitude for “radio noise, vinyl crackles, abandoned places, the Baltic Sea, [the genre of] cyberpunk, oval[s], sine waves, glitches, and Soviet synths.” That last category is interesting; somewhere in the music of the past there lies a potential that has yet to be fully expressed. Harmash likens it, implicitly, to the sweep of the Baltic Sea and the pleasingly predictable (or natural) oscillations of a sine wave.
These observations, made by us a couple of months ago, help in establishing some kind of raison d'etre for Belarusian electronica. The fact that one of the nation's oldest and best-established artists in positioned as #1 in the CD's playlist suggests that we are supposed to pay these "older" views particular attention.
Next up is Sanytch, i.e., Aliaksandr Niavolin, also a native of Belarus. Because he has also been the subject of our attention recently, we can draw upon some older notes and see whether they start to form a sense of kindred enterprise with Harmash - or others. As we recorded previously, Sanytch - shown above - was educated both in his homeland and Russia. He now resides in the Czech Republic, where he works simultaneously as a web designer, DJ, photographer, and musician. Niavolin has been employed in the field of graphic arts since 1997, and – on a loftier level – winning web design accolades since 2002. Now a member of both the Belarusian Designers’ Union and the All-Russian Internet Academy, he operates his own company, Creasence, from the picturesque streets of Prague.
Belarus remains on his mind, sometimes in the context of a national scene - and whether or not it even exists. “I know a bit about contemporary Belarusian music. Unfortunately, though, Belarusian musicians aren’t exactly the most famous in the world. I’d say we have maybe 5 reasonably interesting ensembles nationwide, but the target audience of those performers remains the kind of nations that used to make up the USSR.”
One might reasonably assume that Sanytch is referring here either to commercial music (on hard media) or primetime entertainment. When he speaks – at least implicitly – of web-based, “post-commercial” outfits, things look jollier, since net-releases operate outside of market concerns – and therefore outside marketplaces with fixed addresses. “Nowadays, I get the impression that we [in Belarus] have a real chance to participate in the evolution of music worldwide. If I remember correctly, one of Belarus‘ ambient composers – i/dex – is now working together with the German musician Stefan Betke of the [glitch/dubtronica] project called ‘Pole.’ Then there’s another dub-techno musician, Pavel Ambiont, who’s working with DJ Pinch from the UK.”
He goes on: “Belarus now hosts a lot of minimal-electronica events, even on an international level. Dub techno and minimal techno both seem to be very popular there. That’s a tendency I’m personally fond of, too.” Minimal techno does indeed play an important role in his musical output – and the worldview thereof. His track on offer here, "Flower Dealer," employs that minimalist outlook to striking effect. The quietest of sounds are positioned amid the muffled voices of socialist political broadcasts: miniature flowers become a tiny, fleeting statement of beauty amid grander, slower forms of colorless "development."
Pansies and stately podia stand side by side. The former are more appealing, despite their insignificance.
In talking to Sanytch about this compilation, we learned that he has a special affinity for the track offered by Selffish, entitled - in the same spirit of evanescing beauty - "Farewell." Selffish (above) is a Baltic musician, born in 1973 as Andrew Eigus, and referred to in the cover notes. He has been making music since 2002, using this moniker that's designed to combine the terms "selfish" and "shellfish": through that wordplay, arrogance is thus reduced to the enclosed, submerged scale of what he refers to as "an ethereal listening experience or foregrounded ambient music." Ambience is dragged into the foreground: a modesty of scale is made manifest.
Selffish does this by bidding "farewell" to any maximalism, "fusing melodies with minimal beats in order to create original and organic sounds. To add another layer to his music, he also incorporates field recordings from around the city of Riga." The more numerous the layers, the less visible the artist: selfishness slips into the realm of shellfish. It does so especially well in a tiny country, where - as Eigus says himself - "it rains often." The sense of immersion or being swamped is easily obtained.
Probably no stage-name speaks more clearly to this philosophy of willful humility than that of Pavel Ambiont, born in 1978 and also involved in the downtempo project Nerdy Dubz that's afforded another/second track on this compilation. Last time we looked at his discography, we pointed out that Ambiont has more than ten years DJ-ing experience under his belt. For the last six or seven years, however, he has increasingly turned his hand to conceptual projects, involving not only fluid soundscapes – a long way from the dancefloor – but digital experimentation in the visual arts, too.
This had led to a general style he labels “techno dub drive,” epitomized by its “precise sound placement, subtle rhythmic structures and minimalist approach.” It operates in a realm where “ancient shamanism meets the mysticism of the hi-tech era.” These ideas mirror his grad-school research, conducted into the development of rhythmic patterns in shamanistic cultures, i.e., their construction of meaning through repetitive, increasingly immersive forms.
The work of Selffish and Ambiont is, therefore, designed to develop or give voice to strata of external significance, all of which increase a sense of growing, outside context at the expense of one's own proud, autobiographical "text." We see this time and time again amid the Belarusian musicians, such as Microbe, who appears to have no site and no promotional materials, save the following few sentences. "Microbe is a young musician from Minsk. His enthusiasm for music began in his childhood. He has played both bass guitar and drums in several ensembles. Although he came rather late to electronic music, he now cannot imagine working without it... His compositions are all positioned within an emotional/atmospheric sphere or shell (obolochka)."
The layered, rainy, and ahistorical contexts of Selffish's work, for example, are now termed an "enclosed sphere." This music is designed to foster an isolated realm that although informed by the humbling sweep of Eastern Europe's landscape, also hides from it. It has its eyes on other domains, high above the here & now.
Moving through the track-listing's rationale, i.e., precisely as it's presented to us, we next encounter Denis (aka "Dzenis") Mantsevich (b.1988), who usually works in the vague area between ambient and downtempo or deep techno, to the degree that some of his instrumentals can also be found on a large Russian dance portal. All of these sonic sketches have been directly inspired both by nature as a whole and the Belarusian/Russian landscape, more specifically by its open, “oceanic” expanses.
When we last examined his music, it was in the context of an EP called “Degree of Latitude,” composed of three minimalist/dub techno tracks: “Steppe,” “Siberia,” and “Taiga.” This was, in other words, an EP named in honor of (potentially) mappable space – that offered no more than three inexact, imprecise definitions of ineffably grand domains. Hence, no doubt, the dub elements of his techno. The only way in which concrete, punctuated units of sound can hope to do justice to the massive realms they evoke is - as in any self-respecting dub-cut - to fade away.
Mantsevich has said in the past that by playing with forms of echo, sonic fade, and self-erasure, even, he tries to “reach harmony in his thoughts and ideas, a sense of both serenity and balance.” That would suggest that an equal opportunity or chance exists for the same serenity and balance to be lost...
If the natural scale on which these ideas develop is insufficiently impressive, one need only turn to the compositions of Uncou (aka Un-Co or Artsiom Khudziakou, shown above and smoking up a storm). Although inspired by the geographically specific heritage of England's Warp Records and Detroit techno, he continues to list his main influences as "the entirety of creation... and the Holy Trinity."
This dramatic scale leaves us with four more musicians. Once that spiritual benchmark has been established, merging the nothingness of shellfish with a similarly quiet membership in some divine congregation, where- or how else can the worldview of Belarusian electronica develop?
Parametric (above), covered by us in the autumn of 2008 and known to family members as Oleg Yaque, is the album's clearest exponent of deep house. Put differently, he draws upon the "melancholy, dream-like and beautiful" aspects of a US tradition that - in prior decades - would mix looped samples from political speeches and broadcast them to predominantly gay or Black audiences in underground clubs. This music, in other words, advocated an active, socially committed worldview that was rooted in forms of faith; early deep house tracks were sometimes referred to as a new(!) kind of gospel, since they drew both upon a soul heritage and the "preacherly" intonation of Black civic speakers. Deep house, whilst an escapist form of dance music, thus became a form of confused, elemental protest, too: linguistically political, yet musically apolitical.
Spiritual and civic issues develop hand in hand, both in Parametric's background and across this CD.
Moving from another Baltic contribution, thanks to the "essential ambient" work of Latvia's Kriipis Tulo, the album winds down with a closing, second instrumental from the founder of i/dex, this time as the side-project Harmashh. Things have therefore come full circle; issues of supposed "progression" have been handed over to a cyclical process, one clearly inspired by ecological and ecclesiastical themes. That process returns to the past, in more ways than one.
Prior to the Harmashh outro, the Belarusian ensemble World Government offers a lovely instrumental called "Rain, Drops." Summarizing the natural inspiration behind this album, the track opens to the sound of rain falling upon a tin roof. The smallest, shabbiest of structures resonates to the sound of constant, tiny contact from the sky. Ineffable dimensions briefly adopt an audible form when they rattle across the "microbe-like" scale of sheds, shellfish, and florists' kiosks.
The members of World Government offer a concrete, verbal manifesto to accompany these sonic statements. "Any official contact with extraterrestrials will not be possible until our planet becomes One State! Music is in your head, not your ears! Life beats any sense of rebellion out of people, making them...? We've been a long way from home, gathering memories, finding muses. We've sung for ourselves for too long. Now we're coming back..."
Any official contact with extraterrestrials will not be possible until our planet becomes One State! Music is in your head, not your ears! Life beats any sense of rebellion out of people, making them...? We've been a long way from home, gathering memories, finding muses. We've sung for ourselves for too long. Now we're coming back...
These grand statements of imperial intent are, of course, more than ironic. Likewise, any talk of a "state" is to be understood not in political terms, but in the context of land, sea, and spirit. Places like Belarus, once positioned on the edge of somebody else's empire, still offer the ideal viewing post for philosophical options beyond the cocky permanence of terra firma.
These musicians, looking beyond the false security of politics and (a) fixed place, make "mental contact" with different notions of social membership or shared faith. The sad shells or obolochki of a previous social project form the basis for another, gentler equivalent.
In the track from Sanytch, the political voices mentioned above all come from Brezhnev's term in office. We hear the manipulated mumble of a '70s Soviet newsreader and, floating over the top, the distant tones of Polish muse, Anna German. In times of another civic stagnation, musicians like Sanytch and World Government, together with their Belarusian colleagues, are quietly fostering a better worldview, with one eye on Western musical skills and the other on a local heritage. The romance of socialist culture in Poland continues to offer a philosophy that, on the basis of local traditions, looks beyond the limits of a fixed nation (thanks in no small part to a digital toolbox). As with any muse, now or in 1970, the physical features of a living, breathing individual are imbued with a yearning that's considerably grander - and frequently unobtainable. German herself died tragically young.
The wider this romantic purview, the smaller its authors seem. Dreaming of a lot - of some superior "state" - the exponents of Belarus electronica need to make themselves small, in order to stress that scale. "Coming back" to their roots via artists like i/dex, whose work both opens and closes the album, these artists cherish a humbling, insistent romanticism against a growing backdrop or philosophical sweep of fields, shorelines, and something further still...
That's what makes "Mental Contact" so quiet and beautiful; it's the sound of thoughts in action, operating one step away from the crumbling bricks and concrete.
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