From Laziness to Liberty: Jekka, Jazz Gangsters, and Piper Spray

Jekka (Evgenia Nedosekina, Moscow)

Jekka is the stage-name of a promising singer-songwriter from Moscow, Evgenia Nedosekina. Information generated by her central webpage(s) comes to us in the form of a Twitter feed; lengthy debate is not to be expected, although her page at Vkontakte generates a little more interaction and upbeat discussion. That disparity between one's "online presence" and willful absence from a keyboard begs the question: what keeps this young woman so busy? One of those recent Tweets included the telling phrase in Russian: "Reality does not impress me." And, close by on her Facebook page, Nedosekina then defines herself as a "hopeless dreamer." 

Reality does not impress me

Reverie evidently overshadows dull actuality - and fantasy is probably courted in a horizontal position, which makes typing even more difficult. 

Other data posted online about Jekka's day-to-day professional obligations continues in the same wistful fashion. The release date of some forthcoming songs is declared, with unproductive vagueness, to be "soon." Her chosen genres are, in an imprecise manner, documented as "Pop, Alternative... and 'Other.'" Specificity and a sense of purposeful direction are rare - from a (relatively) care-free individual armed only with the creative support of a "MicroKORG and friends' help." 

With a little effort, an occasional statement of intent can be found. Her favorite quote is a line from "Flashdance" (1983): "You give up your dream - you die." It should not be interpreted literally, though. A world-famous celebration of careerism - come what may - becomes instead an insistence(!) upon pensiveness. Cherished dreams becoming dreaming, pure and simple; goals become absent-minded wistfulness. Eagerly sought wistfulness!

Jekka's songs are brief and occasionally delivered from beneath a slight layer of ambient hiss. Charming miniaturism and a lo-fi, fickle spontaneity assist one another, such that she speaks about any long-term, "serious" plans with both irony and self-deprecation: "Performing, playing gigs, being in the charts, releasing singles, and making an album." All are laughed off.

This could be a f***ing amazing hit record (813)

To state the obvious, in between any amateurism and "worldwide fame" there must be networks of support on a grander scale than just friends and family. It's heartening, therefore, to see the kindly phrasing left at Soundcloud by some of the capital's musicians, championed on FFM and who are actively helping out. For example, Moscow's 813 (Alexander Goryachev) remarked of one song: "This could be a f***ing amazing hit record if it ever gets recorded properly!!!!!!! Really cool stuff." Seven exclamation marks show a high degree of faith in the future.

Sergei Malefique, in the same way, says "Beautiful!"... to which Ms. Nedosekina replies: "Maybe you could work some of your magic on this?" Favor by favor, colleague by colleague, the distance between pensiveness and purpose is lessened. Energy levels rise.

With Bjork, Bowie, and Dylan as her guiding lights, Jekka has also been reducing the distances between places near and far, home and away. The Italian magazine Domus recently published a mixtape made by her and Moa Pillar (Fedor Perezverev). It involved many of the musicians whom we help on this site: The Taiga, Moa Pillar himself, Slow, Ol, Lapti, Nocow, Vtgnike, Wols, Pixelord, and Stoned Boys... Everybody and anybody. All are welcome.

A similarly happy sense of inclusive disorder is applied to Jekka's texts for some web-based publications. This, for example, is how she describes her hometown for an Italian audience: as somebody so fond of daydreaming, it seems reasonable she'd offer a good-natured view of Moscow's clamorous disorder. And sure enough, the city's hurried pace, seemingly without center or logic, indeed creates room for detachment, abstract musings, and other unexpected associations, all born of bright contrast.  

The hubbub of Moscow's crowds and street vendors, constantly hustling...

"As a rule, people nowadays don't wake up to the sounds of the jungle - especially if they happen to live in a vast metropolis. Here in Moscow, however, a strange mix of elephantine sounds and Soviet soundtracks floods the world each and every weekend, courtesy of the century-old zoo that nestles in the city center. [That discord comes from] the hubbub of crowds and street vendors, constantly hustling to sell some cheap plastic toy or other. It all blends with the endless weeping of children, pulling their parents in the direction of a candy stand."

These sounds of a present-day, urban environment serve one clear purpose: they're a conduit to the past and happy childhood memories. In which case, contemplation and pensiveness - being inherently irrational - simultaneously become an alternative to goal-driven, humorless, and adult pragmatism.

"I don't really remember the first time I visited the zoo. A faded photograph of me - sitting on a pony - suggests it was somewhere around six years of age. But every weekend, I still hear those familiar sounds of an animal kingdom, just like a wake-up call." Reality may not "impress," but it at least serves to fuel both retrospection and further dreams. Although Jekka is, by trade, an architect who studies the metamorphoses, over time, of Moscow's grand and civic spaces, much of her creative effort - as we see - is spent upon the reduction of space to a small, welcoming enclave.

Where little happens but much is imagined.

Devoted to hip-hop and bebop!

A kindred sense of retrospection and yearning is important in the catalog of St Petersburg's Jazz Gangsters. Their work ethic, just as the last time we showcased their material, is elegantly defined by the B&W image they use as a logo (below). Eleven anonymous jazz musicians are shown in a deliberately posed, yet good-natured photograph, as if they're caught mid-performance by some pleasant surprise. Their actual identity, however, is decisively removed with a black rectangle placed across the eyes of each performer. What results is much love, respect, and enthusiasm for tradition, but not for the "unique" individuals who constitute it.

This is a celebration of music, not musicians. Of a process, not a product. From the outset we can already see how the baroque twists and turns of a bebop aesthetic - subjected to modern turntablism! - will find much common ground with Jekka's trademark fantasy. 

And, as a result of that same complex activity, an album has now transpired on Lucky Time Records: "Golden Jazzyland." The raison d'etre of this leisurely, languid, and instrumental CD - at least from a verbal point of view - is arguably best found amid the lengthy mixes regularly published by these nameless musicians in between their official releases on hard media.

Those mixes are advertised with small, witty texts designed to promote a leisurely worldview - one that ideally would operate in unhurried synch with the changing seasons. The last Jazz Gangsters mix, for example, was introduced as follows in Russian: "Summer is now behind us - and we dedicated the whole of that season to music-making. As a result, you'll soon get a chance to hear our album: it's rich with the spirit of jazz, bright summer days, and wanton inactivity!" Precise because of that dreamy outlook, the musicians have seen good cause of late for general "optimism and lots of positive energy."

The spirit of bright summer days... and wanton inactivity

As mentioned, we've already encountered the work of this artist on earlier occasions, both as ABC100 and through his day-to-day identity as Aleksandr Siniagin. Despite our ability to ascertain these roles, and even garner the occasional email, he remains stubbornly anonymous. In the past Mr. Siniagin has described his crumpled output as a combination of noise and glitch that's then edited using various "literary techniques - in order to create sound collages... and thus conjure an abstract view of culture." 

Piper Spray: "Omnicron Girls" (2011)

In a different venue, and on a different occasion, ABC100/ Siniagin has clarified this creative process a little. He has, in the past, claimed to look for various parallels between the narrative arcs of great novels and the structure of his own instrumental compositions. "I focus my mind on the mechanics of verbal entertainment." It should be pointed out, however, that he traces the development of famous stories less from an event-driven perspective than a phonetic one; put differently, he tries to transfer the sonic evolution and appeal of a story into musical forms. This is what ABC100 calls the "dynamics of [or within] the syllable." He stresses the interaction of appealing sounds, rather than of fixed, unwavering words.

The dynamics of - or within - any syllable

By bidding farewell to stable styles, locations, and fixed designations, Piper Spray lays claim to subjectivity as an open system. The artwork he used for a prior release, "A Lot of Crabs," shown below, illustrated that notion rather nicely. 

Jekka invokes the aimless movement of a Moscow zoo in order to champion wandering imagination and childhood values over commonsensical, linear intent. Then, in a related spirit, we've seen how the Jazz Gangsters position ornate bebop motifs against the angular severity of their neoclassical hometown, both textually and visually. They validate constant deviation over any (one) direction. The freedom to wander - spatially, sonically, and mentally - is most important. And then, in closing, we find the barely audible structures of Piper Spray who sidesteps the structural norms of song- and music-making by hiding them under waves of distortion.

It's a devolutionary process he imagines in terms of "lots of [linguistic] crabs," scuttling up a paper beach in order to evolve all over again. Letter by jumbled letter. 

ABC100: "A Lot of Crabs" (2011)