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The netlabel MixGalaxy is celebrating its first birthday - and producing new material to mark that festive occasion. Just as the last twelve months have shown a dizzying publication rate from MixGalaxy of fifteen varied releases, so this latest album also offers a wide range of talent.
More specifically, the "Downtempest Compilation" is made of fifteen artists, almost all of whom are virtually anonymous. Detective work conducted online will produce nothing more than a single webpage for almost all the contributors: text, images, and video are all extremely thin on the ground.
The upside of that paucity, however, is that we're presented with fifteen genuinely new names. These artists have all released some material with MixGalaxy before, but their web presence has remained remarkably low-key. Here, therefore, we provide a snapshot of seven contributors to this recent, quintessentially northern album of downtempo instrumentals.
Together these seven names help to sketch a generally happy rationale behind the birthday compilation - no matter how pursed their lips or downcast their gaze may be.
Starting in the busy center of Moscow, we have Nuts Gives Power (above), whose name and t-shirt both show scant concern for grammar. We're offered no information about NGP's origins or intentions, save the fact that his music is - purportedly - influenced by the wallpaper on his desktop monitor.
In that throwaway statement alone we sense a tension between musical statement (as an activity) and willful anonymity (as an aim). Understatement, in other words, becomes an vigorously sought goal. The NGP track on display here, entitled "Dashing," is neither fast nor imposing! A mere 79 seconds in length, it includes the sampled voice of a British boy and his mother, singing "Jingle Bells" and stating how much they like to dress up.
"Dashing," therefore, refers not to any linear striving by the musician, but to the words of an Xmas song. Time and the seasons fly by, leaving our musician to one side. Time is experienced, rather than used to good effect.
Second on the list is Moscow colleague Gerdes, aka Ivan Sergeev, born in 1974. He runs a sparse blog with various semi-serious musings on life, but manages to distill the essence of his daily scribbles on one well-known music portal. "Well, then," he begins in an improvised and deliberately unpolished fashion. "I'm a metal worker. I've been in that line of work all my life. I can't do anything else. I don't read books, I don't watch films, I don't listen to music, I avoid people - and I sleep in my clothes...."
I don't listen to music, I avoid people - and I sleep in my clothes...
The line between honesty and humor is blurred, just as his rare images sit somewhere between cute and creepy. With a diminishing faith in language - and therefore in any confidently made statement - vagaries and quietness begin to increase.
The longer this process continues, the less we feel able to rely on Sergeev's statements: "I love dressing in women's clothing. I hate kids. I recommend that people take showers...."
As if mocking the ability of speech to offer any ontological insights, Sergeev then offers some thoughts in verse. The "lofty" workings of poetry are swiftly deflated. Translated into English prose, his mock-melancholy stanza reads: "Life is like a box of candy; a box full of half-dead slugs. You'll pop into the canteen, looking for life... but there isn't any. There's neither life, nor the box in which it came."
We're told that his track for "Downtempest," curtly labeled as "11 24," refers to a old Soviet price tag. The composition consists of some muted, ambient keyboards that are almost displaced by the dull chatter from a supermarket checkout. We're surrounded by the noises of people in search of candy - who are no doubt discovering other, less pleasing contents in their containers.
Another of Sergeev's images, shown below, expresses a complete lack of satisfaction with these busy realms of material enterprise. He labels a packet of raw meat with a single, sarcastic noun: "Pleasure."
The music may endure and its author may continue to write - but both activities lead to a sense of growing silence and smallness amid the crude shoptalk of daily life.
In fact Sergeev's most recent post on his blog says - with marked irony: "I'm not updating this blog any more. I've gotten tired of reading all the incoming mail - with the endless requests for me to keep writing. Good Lord, there are too may letters! Too many letters! I am too popular! Folks simply like me too much!"
Such is the humor of somebody who has, almost despite himself, come to terms with the bitter-sweet pleasures of solitude.
Last of our three Moscow artists is Restin, otherwise known as Boris Kostin. His biography, stripped of Segeev's subversive, if not masochistic humor, is also reduced to the barest of outlines. We're informed that he began working musically almost three years ago, having progressed from early experiments with an acoustic guitar. Yet again, this contribution to the MixGalaxy album is a combination of very understated melody and overwhelming ambient noise, in this case of wind, flames - and what appear to be the very distant sounds of a scream.
If we move beyond or away from the capital, these tendencies seem to increase. In Nizhnyi Novgorod we find Waterplea, a duo (shown above) who prefer to be known in anglicized terms as Alex Inkin and Paul Pigalov. Having studied together, they now pen music in tandem.
They offer no promotional texts, though, preferring instead to work in distant reticence on tracks such as "Improved Silence," which we offer here. The title of that (very) delicate recording neatly underscores the shared desire of Inkin and Pigalov not to contradict or even interrupt silence; those two words instead become a declaration of Waterplea's wish to recognize, validate, and somehow enhance noiselessness.
These are sounds made in admiration of sound's absence.
The same theme of fire - as a rapid guarantor of hush, perhaps - reemerges in the track "Zaria" (Dawn) from Belgorod's VAD, about whom we are told nothing. Instead, what appears to be the crackle of a bonfire turns into a traditional chorus in celebration of the sun's appearance. The music is a recognition of the sun's noiseless ascent, brought to us from the antique cityscape shown below.
The same is true of material from Alien S, based in the Siberian city of Tiumen'. With absolutely nothing to say, he instead presents us with a repeated image on his MySpace page of what looks like a rabbit's crude silhouette, shown at the bottom of the page. That animal, itself speechless(!), sits in awe of the sun's distant movement across remote hills.
The object of interest and attention is neither here nor audible. The music reacts to that distance and hushed movement with respect - all to the detriment of volume and vigor.
Perhaps the most faraway contributor to the Mixgalaxy project comes from the ancient Ukrainian town of Vinnitsa, where we find the artist referred to as Mobil. Unknown to us by his real name, Mobil works normally in the (loud!) field of trance and not in the quiet, unhurried sphere of his contribution here: "The Winter's Story." Nonetheless, even in the pounding 4x4 format of trance, he finds the kind of peace and quiet celebrated by "Downtempest."
The view from Mobil's apartment is shown above; from the same location he writes: "Trance is like that rarest of girls - the kind you can only love. You can't understand why; you just feel it. Trance lifts you high - and it sends you off on the kind of journey from which you never want to return. You're given so much energy - and a real sense of relaxation too... You feel reconciled with the world. It's so powerful... it's not the kind of sensation you get from a person you merely like, but from somebody you truly love!"
You feel reconciled with the world...
Mobil posts that image of local housing with pride. What makes it interesting is its anonymity; it could be a vista across Soviet rooftops in any Russian or Ukrainian town. The wide application of his statements comes from a kind of self-erasure; by placing himself in a faceless environment and celebrating a universal, "trance-like" experience, Mobil's private jottings take on wider relevance. By saying nothing and living nowhere (in particular), this young man and his musings could refer to anyone.
The more silence is revealed in this music, the "further" we've travelled away from cacophonous supermarkets - and therefore help to celebrate the silence that even makes music possible. It's a fittingly restrained outlook with which to mark MixGalaxy's first birthday.
Siberian rabbits concur as they gaze upon noiseless hilltops.
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