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Over the last week or so, new releases have come to us from several young electronic musicians whom we've championed at least once before. The three figures in question are Little Nastya (aka Stas Uvarovskii), Enko (aka "Artem" [above]), and Moscow drone exponents, AAGSF. What has become especially interesting among these three artists, spread far across the map, is their increasing unwillingness to employ language. Their biographical sketches remain maximally slender; PR texts are rarely forthcoming (in both senses of the word), and interviews remain a distant hope.
Instead these performers employ both static imagery and forms of instrumental expression that move further from spatial or generic specificity. Their compositions become increasingly vague as they leave dictionaries and thesauri behind them on the floor.
Little Nastya, as we mentioned in the Fall of 2009, is actually a member of the male persuasion (Stas Uvarovskii). We followed his earlier experiments with the Moscow hip-hop project 2-99 and (more than once) St. Petersburg's Subwise, too. Those later efforts marked a transition from hip- to glitch-hop, cast in the general context of some literary cyberpunk references. William Gibson's name, in fact, continues to float in the general vicinity of these recordings, in that Little Nastya often employs technological motifs - in order to underscore their themes of inhuman, disorienting social forces.
Put differently, his glitch-hop, with all it its blips, squeaks, and mistakes, is a search for human sounds in an alienating world.
A search of enduring naivety.
In September 2009, we used the following mini-text from Uvarovskii to frame this worldview: “Reach out and touch the soft sounds and rusting halftones, sense the smell of emotional breakdown, listen once and enter the routine of an unclean love for life/ briefly and unstably/ lushly and in paranoid fashion/ uneasily and not too simply/ without obligations and promises, turn it all on – and pass along the sounds and notes, along the clicks and alleyways of a small, surreal world, where your guide will be Little Nastya.”
If he can tear himself away from the turntables.
These narratives of "surreality" would develop further. A month later, Uvarovskii released a series of instrumentals dedicated to the theme of "Afrika." That proper noun was open to a dual interpretation; our musician was - seemingly - invoking not only a scorched desert to match Gibson's techno-wilderness. The same term, Afrika, also refers to a real-world, distant cape on Russia's Pacific coast. As we said at the time, that strip of land was given an exotic title "because the place was further from home than anyone had ever been (or seen); standard reference points did not suffice. This was an impossibly, indescribably isolated address."
Afrika was a place that had no fitting name, and was therefore best evoked without the aid of grammar books.
And we now have a new EP, extending these ideas even further. The release is called "Dub or Tub" and manages to squeeze seven tracks into fifteen minutes; it has yet to be published and so we offer Little Nastya our thanks for a promo copy.
The respect for generic purity here is minimal; everything is chopped and changed. The title refers to a general slippage or instability in the material world: specific names, places, and other fixed forms slowly vanish into echoing expanses, be they digital or geographical. As we can see from the new images of Uvarovskii in the top third of this post, he records himself exclusively at work, developing the ideas of his earlier recordings further still. If, though, his instrumentals really have "further" investigated issues of distance, the ineffable, and/or audible demise, what comes next?
The bubble-gum image used above would suggest that a degree of brinkmanship will come into play - an extreme dalliance with extreme ideas, at least from a youthful or innocently "childish" viewpoint.
On more than one occasion, this new EP deals with themes of risk and resulting demise - once and for all. The happens most clearly in a remix of Suicide's "Ghost Rider," a homage to the Marvel comic book from which the band took its name. Given that those same comics tell the story of a stunt rider who sells his soul "to the Devil," these parallels will not be the happiest.
Nonetheless, Uvarovskii keeps pushing onward with his musical curiosity and the symbolism thereof, no matter how humbling the results may be: talk of the "Devil," for example, is going to radically diminish one's sense of agency! Our musician is fully aware of this inverse relationship between effort and optimism. In fact if we look at his MySpace page, it now bears a new tagline: "Too Happy Muzik." The self-deprecating spelling of that noun, together with the dark humor of an art form "too happy" for its own good, both suggest that these instrumentals are gravitating from the happy expression of a young man's musical desire into more committed and serious forms of drive.
The distance from bubblegum to motorbikes and Beelzebub is far indeed.
So what of the next contestant, Enko? This musician, as we noted for the first time in August, 2009, is from the town of Sumy in Northern Ukraine. Here, as with Little Nastya, we were left with the impression that the musician's working environment was inspiring a certain kind of sound and outlook; Uvarovskii, after all, lists himself (falsely) as a resident of Los Angeles, so he's clearly not happy at home.
Of Enko's domestic context, we wrote: "In WWII Sumy was pounded by German forces and consequently has a rather peculiar architectural appearance today, a combination of older buildings that survived the bombing – shown above- and large tracts of Soviet apartments, built on the rubble of the twentieth century. In terms of geography, imagery, and history, therefore, Sumy is a peripheral location, balanced between opposing states, in several senses of the word."
It's a sensation of being dragged in two directions at once.
This general sensation was underscored by the artwork that Enko (above) used for an early EP. The images evoked, as we said, a "once-living organism now caught in limbo or suspended in spirit. The remnants of a prior empire in the Kunstkamera," perhaps. The newest extension to this liminal viewpoint is brief indeed. Four instrumentals, running for less than ten minutes, go under the collective title of the "o2 EP." They are available for free download from the French netlabel Pavillon 36; the cyclical artwork is shown above. An alternative download, together with the same graphics, is available from Archive.org.
Both locations inform us in the briefest terms that we're dealing with "a short but sweet release. Nearly ten minutes of melancholic melodies, twisted on crunchy beats."
Drawing parallels with Little Nastya, we see overlapping themes of melancholy (or a rather grim sense of drive) plus a leaning towards the broken, limping syncopation of glitch/crunch tracks. Those sounds in the discographies of both artists come to embody processes of disembodiment. A loss of singular, ostensible self finds expression in snapped rhythms, disappearing dub tracks, and mistake-riddled glitch.
Visually, Enko had added to this outlook, too (especially since he offers zero textual support). Singular, serious self-portraits have become bizarre, if not grotesque scrapbook projects (above), in which no one element is important than any other. Symmetry, common sense, and natural laws fall by the wayside. All of these decomposed/recomposed experiments speak to the loss of a center and/or goal-driven enterprise.
And that brings us to the possibility of hope; in a world devoid of core values or fixed - and therefore nameable - systems, is there hope for a new ethical framework, away from the struggles of the here and now?
AAGSF (i.e., Aliens a Galatic Sound) is/are a Moscow outfit to whom we first turned in the early days of this site. They never provide portraits of the people involved; on almost all occasions, textual information is wholly absent. Instead, as we've mentioned before, the project prefers to conjure - and guide - a vague, general aura with copious images. As we wrote last year: "The sounds evoked by the empty venues of AAGSF’s photography strive overtly to express an enduring sonic presence; something that purely is or exists both before and after the structural constraints of a song. Not progression through a given structure, but a state."
The sounds evoked by the empty venues of AAGSF’s photography strive overtly to express an enduring sonic presence; something that purely is or exists both before and after the structural constraints of a song. Not progression through a given structure, but a state.
These images continue to grow in number, most of which are located on an outside site. Their typically dark, sunless cityscapes frame the drone-based compositions that AAGSF produces with regularity.
By April, 2009, the themes on display from AAGSF had fallen into line with those of Little Nastya and Enko, or at least had become their logical extension: a handicapped existence in ostensible (or even digital) reality had lead to a yearning for other, elusive forms of unity. “Matter cannot appear, nor can it disappear. The AAGSF project has always been that way, too. The sounds of new galaxies, of new civilizations. AAGSF is the heritage of a global infinity.”
As we would learn by October, the key word in that quote is "heritage"; these tracks are grounded in a yearning for what was - or might have been. They speak quietly to a wholeness that language only ruptures. A net-album in October last year entitled “Galaxy Sleep” pondered those ineffable forms of cohesion, all absent in the here and now: instrumentals were tagged with names such as “Star,” “Galaxy,” “Resonance,” and “Essence.” All were vague and none were open to easy categorization.
What, then, of 2010? The project's latest sounds, now available for free, can be obtained both from the RusZud label and Archive. That former location, somewhat surprisingly, includes a few sentences from AAGSF(!). Offered us in English, they're rather tricky to decipher. In a cleaned-up form, and with a little guesswork, they would appear to read: "This [recording] is one life, collected from various stories, at least over the period 2005 – 2010. These [same, musical] stories resort from a birth and a searching, before anything was formed or found. This is history, told by sounds."
This [recording] is one life, collected from various stories, at least over the period 2005 – 2010. These [same, musical] stories resort from a birth and a searching, before anything was formed or found. This is history, told by sounds.
The text continues: "Space is closer than it seems; it offers a magic more real than reality itself. Likewise, each of us is something more than we can [clearly/logically] present to ourselves. That reality is not one of summarizing; it is a[n eternally] transitive form of time. It travels from a beginning within an infinite future. [These tracks] offer a pleasant flight within the depths of space. They offer warmth and magic - though not clarity."
The driven, troubled searches for singularity audible in the new recordings from Little Nastya - and visible in Enko's ravaged portraits - become a calm acquiescence to passage and mutability. Judging by the AAGSF photography, it's a state that towers above the supposedly "unifying" potentials of Russian/Soviet social planning.
We managed a few days ago to get hold of AAGSF online. They told us, in marginally more specific terms, that this new album, called "5-10," is made of "10 tales from over a five year period." That much we knew. In addition, we were informed that these drone compositions concern "romance, sadness, the cosmos, our inner world, and love... The album isn't so much a summation of any sort. It's more an expression of melancholy - about life's passing. About the fact we're an inherent part of the present... and maybe of the future, too! We think the recording turned out to be rather romantic in tone."
That conclusion, it seems fair to say, helps to map the general trajectory of our three musicians at the start of 2010. Disoriented by the aimless, often wayward structures of a digitally driven or "deterritorialized" environment, they nonetheless find slight solace in the kind of twilight or unfocused cityscapes that remind us on occasion of a night sky. These are places where the fading sounds of dub and the broken shapes of glitch-hop adopt grander, material forms. A glance upwards, towards the sky of AAGSF's photography, pushes their ostensible awkwardness out of our vision altogether.
Having breathed a deep sigh of relief with the realization that unity or endurance might be found among the timelessness of nighttime stars, at least one of our musicians falls immediately(!) to worries that his lifespan is but an instant in comparison. The anxious search for a lasting significance, therefore, comes with the simultaneous realization that such (grand) values require a certain humility or modesty... which again becomes anxiety. Voiced in musical terms, these two incompatible states are bound closely to one another: the romance of "universal" drone and the nervousness of glitch.
Together they match the oppositions of an Enko image below, taken in a Ukrainian park after dark; a backdrop of soothing or anchorless depth... which merely serves to underscore the pettiness and transience of all that flits across the foreground.
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