Hot Arctic: Dub Techno Inspired by Mermaids, Mapmakers, and "Mother"

Sergey Suokas is a young exponent of deep and dub techno from the forested, often frozen lands of Karelia. We've paid attention to his work on four or five occasions before. Today's reason is the release of a new album; it marks another step forward in what Suokas himself describes as effort conducted in between two opposing poles: "atmospheric abstraction" (published under the moniker of Slow) and more "melodic electronic" works (offered to the public as Hot Arctic). The six tracks in this post come from that latter outfit; the image above is the artwork to Hot Arctic's newest recording.

Born in 1986, Sergey has appeared on this site not only as a solo performer, but also because he has the good sense and taste to collaborate with other promising figures of the Russian scene such as Krasnodar's Feldmaus (itself an offshoot of the wonderful Modul). These opening lines already suggest that staying abreast of Suokas' work is not the easiest task in the world. The public should, therefore, be grateful whenever he sketches his plans - in simple terms - on one of his web venues.

At the start of this year, he penned a few of lines of gratitude for his listeners. "You've always supported me and my creative work. I'd like to be able to send you some [suitably] warm vibes in return, both through this message and my music. Thank you :-) "

You've always supported me and my creative work. I'd like to be able to send you some [suitably] warm vibes in return, both through this message and my music. Thank you :-)

He went on to describe how he expects 2010 to be a year of "new directions that'll take me to places I've never seen before. Those directions, of course, will be audible in my music. In my upcoming releases you will see some of my past [emotional/philosophical] conditions." That closing phrase is especially telling; Suokas, like any musician, is keen to speak of his progress, of how the music will move "forward." Nonetheless, he does so in ways that subvert the usual banalities of PR-talk, as we explain below.

In essence he's stating that the more he reveals his forward-looking compositions, the more of his past experiences will be exposed or given increasingly direct expression. The future, in other words, exists purely in terms of how it unveils the past. The further we travel down this road, the more we will lose any sense of progression. Present, past, and forthcoming experiences will all fall into one.

This inherent logic makes sense for an artist whose dancefloor compositions have always been clearly informed by ambient textures, by the desire to create states of (audible) being, rather than any "forward-looking" or pointlessly "innovative" expressions - for the sake of novelty alone.

Some of these works he describes or predicts at the start of 2010 have yet to appear; we're still waiting, for example, for a Passage EP that was slated as a January release. (This text is being published in March; at the time of writing, Suokas' website at least offers the Passage artwork and a streaming sample.) What, conversely, has appeared on schedule is another EP, this time released through the Italian netlabel Audioitalia.

Entitled "Flora and Fauna," it furthers the kind of "centrifugal" aesthetic that we already hear in Suokas' promo-blurbs. In fact the title alone takes us back to some of his earlier releases, like the ambient EP from Slow in January 2009, called "Room Phive." Here our musician not only made appealing use of antique botanical prints to evoke a visual atmosphere that would accompany his dense, "natural" soundscapes. Some of the music on "Room Phive" also invoked the Slavic folklore of mermaids and their liminal existence between two states: the clear-cut shapes of ostensible reality above water and the formless, directionless existence beneath it.

Both the waterlogged landscape of Karelia and the EP's unfocused artwork, shown above, help to underscore these ideas in no uncertain terms.

The Italian "Flora and Fauna" EP was made using a wide range of field recordings from various locations across Europe. Although resident in Karelia, Suokas' music embodies an existence that is simultaneously in multiple places - and therefore nowhere in particular. These "mermaid melodies" take shape between concrete geography and a homeless, ambient existence that has no fixed location. The field recordings used to develop these themes were first committed to tape in Stockholm and Berlin, both a long way from home.

Once they were taken back to Russia, the same sounds were then interwoven with various sonic "layers." What resulted was a "mix of 'non-controlled' sound sources and the 'controllable' scope of electronic sound. All in all, this combination provides an interesting space in which audio-textures, drone, and more [traditionally] musical structures all merge to form a strange atmosphere of introspection."

Again we find a pair of paradoxical, productive opposites: greater movement into a far-flung, "non-controlled" state (i.e., the sweep of geography and ambient textures) allows, unexpectedly, for greater introspection. Better forms of self-knowledge are made analogous with lesser forms of "cohesion." The broader - and more humbling - the canvas in which I find myself, the more self-aware I will be.

These symbols of wide, watery vistas always lurk in the background of Suokas' discography.

That implied and almost riddle-like rationale brings us to the new album, released under the equally paradoxical nom de plume of "Hot Arctic." Called, quite simply - and grandly! - "The Earth," it has just been made available through the Siberian netlabel Electronica. The album also comes at roughly the same time as a new "Breathe Deeper" (Dyshite glubzhe) podcast from the same organization.  These excellent shows come from regular recordings made at Moscow's Shanti nightclub on the first Thursday of each month. Suokas' most recent webcast is designed to present and contextualize the new LP.

The resulting 76-minute mix, on display above, is a wonderfully well-paced affair and a fine introduction to Sergey's craftmanship. Give this recording time to unravel, though; it's in no hurry. As Suokas' music and associated imagery so often suggest, creative endeavors often reveal their truest, fullest colors when things are allowed to take their natural path. Evolution should not be rushed.

The general atmosphere at these Shanti evenings is designed to be maximally inclusive: "Come and listen to some good music. You can come with friends or just on your own." The new Suokas album, building on these invitations and his prior botanical or geographical metaphors, goes one step further with "The Earth."

Come and listen to some good music. You can come with friends or just on your own.

The recording is accompanied by a few programmatic sentences in Russian. "The Earth is all that we have. It is our home and our collective fantasy, too. For some people the 'Earth' is a notion fixed in terms of the globe, while for others it's their daily chores, their family, or some kind of adventures, perhaps. Whatever the case may be, the Earth does indeed exist - and it occupies most of our existence, too. This suggests that things are not as simple as they might seem. Through the Earth we can learn a great deal. We can also remember why we're here in the first place."

Once more, a "progressive" worldview is built through a recollection of the past. Development means disappearing - into natural networks, the meaning and value of which we have long forgotten. "Some people might see this album as a kind of basic electronic music with a rather direct or insistent rhythm - the kind of thing one might find in many other places. Nonetheless, I hope that for some people, this recording will help to open their heart. I hope it'll help them to stop - and give way to introspection, once they've left behind everything that's extraneous or transient in their lives."

The album's opening track is entitled "Viola D'Amore"; its closing number, balancing on the edge of self-parody, is called "Wild Cosmic Poetry." In between them we find related, bridging notions such as "Muddy Stream" or "Leaf." The open-armed stance of amore and a respectful, ecologically-driven view of the world go hand in hand. Both sacrifice proud notions of "progress" to humbling patterns of the past - or one's relative insignificance therein.

Succumbing to romance, music, and nature become very similar tasks. As the oral image above suggests, that same passage, "onwards" from the first hesitant step or surrender, offers much promise - but very little predictability. To use Soukas' own terminology, it's very much a "non-controlled" process.

In pondering these movements from proud isolation to something more social, Sergey Suokas has recently been involved in a fascinating project, one that involves both forward-looking aspirations and an increased "revelation" of the past. He has written a soundtrack for Vsevolod Pudovkin's 1926 silent film, "Mother," based on the novel by Maksim Gorky. This tale of one mother's troubled passage from her own family to larger, more inclusive collectives would inspire Soviet prose for decades. Suokas, drawing on precisely the kind of natural or ecological metaphors that inspired Gorky as a young man, is (again) considering the future through the past - as a potential that still has not been realized, a full 103 years after Gorky's story was published.