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Microbit Project, as we've noted before, is essentially the brainchild of Moscow musician and artist, Evgenii Kharitonov. His endeavors are found with (almost excessive) frequency over a large range of music portals, but on this occasion he has produced something special, together with the French netlabel Pavillon36.
Normally Kharitonov (aka "EugeneKha") tends to work both alone - and with a special passion for lo-fi tools (between 8 kbps and 48 kbps). With no evident financial support and a patent lack of high-end machinery, Kharitonov keeps throwing cheap and cheerful material into the ether, moving through all manner of genres: Noise, Dark Ambient, Drone, Industrial Post-rock, Melodic Hardcore, Rave, Electro Punk "and, of course, lowbit experiments."
These new release is less lowbit than defiantly lowbrow. It makes us glad the web exists. In essence, Kha has put together five examples of what he calls "primitive disco." On some of the other hosts or portals where he's placed this work, he has decided upon referring to it as "cosmic disco," but heaven forbid that one's universe be made solely of this material.
The entire EP was composed using a CASIO SA-20, which - if memory serves us well - is a product of the late 1980s. It's tinny range can be seen and heard in this brief Polish video.
That gesture - of one, low-end musical tool and nothing else - defines the deliberate limits Kha has placed on himself with this "village disco." The five tracks sound enormously like the dumb electro-thump of late Soviet discos, from the same time as the CASIO's lifespan. In places far from urban fashion, these sounds will continue to be popular. Such is the curse of a big country.
To hide from big-city trends in England, for example, is difficult; the distances are simply insufficient. Somehow, whether you like it or not, modishness will pass you by, either as hip songs on the radio, or in the form of school-age fashion victims waiting at a bus stop.
In Russia, though, those same distances can be unspeakable. Fashionable clothes, trendy phrases, and other fickle phenomena may go unchanged for decades, just as Kha is evoking rhythms and instruments of at least twenty years ago. His tracklisting also suggests a depressingly old and predictable series of events at each of these functions: we start with the basic setting: "Rural disco." after which we dream in bold, trendy terms as the evening starts: "Acid Disco."
The picture below suggests more hormones and home-brew than acid.
No such heights of hipdom will be reached. Trouble, as always, will start first: Track 3 is called "Discob*tches" As order slips quickly away, not even the DJ can do anything to stop the violence. Whether he plays music or not, ballads or rock anthems, it makes no difference. Hence the title of Track 4: "The Drunk DJ."
Flirting has become fighting and as the night ends, only one more element is needed to complete this ever-repeating picture: "Disco Hangover."
These are the environments that have been mocked endlessly by Moscow storytellers. We offer two examples: the first is from the popular TV series Comedy Club. The sketch in question is called "Sailor at a Village Disco." A bold, brazen sailor steps into a backwater disco and asks a girl to dance; she replies that a little bit of persuasion will be needed in the form of some tiramisu. The sailor is stunned that anybody could expect him to pull a fancy Italian cake out of his pocket in a dead-end village dance party.
She, now offended, begins reminding him that sweaty sailors don't exactly match her idea of a perfect date, either. And so the insults get worse and worse until they both admit that the only thing they both wanted was sex. The yelling stops and physical honesty steps in.
The second clip of relevance is from the recent (and wonderful) movie by Boris Khlebnikov, "Free Floating" (Svobodnoe plavanie), shown above. It gives verbal and physical forms to the dumbness of Kha's music. Here is the trailer.
If this "primitive disco" is the sound of rural dreaming, how cosmically backward must the speech and gestures of those dancers be? Khlebnikov shows us in ways that are robbed of any emotional soundtrack. Everything is errily silent. Once we're out of the disco, the film gives us no musical clues as to whether these events are funny or tragic.
Probably the latter, which - as we say - is one very good reason to be grateful for the web. It allows an escape from primitive rural disco, no matter how big the fields or how thick the forest.
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