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Starting with the basics, we should point out that Moscow's Hyperboloid Records is - in the simplest of terms - an electronic music label operated by Dmitrii Garin and Alexei Devianin. The project's most recent release appeared a couple of days ago: a debut LP by Acid Mafia called "Surrogate." The reason for this ensemble publishing their music through Hyperboloid is clear enough; 33% of Acid Mafia consists of Mr. Garin. Given this overlap between author and publisher, we would expect loud and confident PR materials.
Sure enough: "Acid Mafia is a striking and remarkable ensemble consisting of Dmitrii Garin on 'electronic devices,' Sergei Frolov on saxophone, and Mitia Vikhornov on keyboards. Every one of their shows is different, because all kinds of guest artists join Acid Mafia on stage. Ultra-modern technology, almost antique drum machines, and other unconventional or non-musical objects all combine on an equal footing in order to produce the sounds of Acid Mafia. If any one term would suffice to describe this wild musical experience, it would be ‘braindance’, thanks to Aphex Twin."
"Greasy, roaring bass-lines pulsate in repetitive and ecstatic rhythms, while fat acid sounds and biting arpeggios break down all forms of resistance and introduce you to an alluring, crazy-ass rhythmic dance! Everyone from vinyl freaks to disco retrogrades, from old-school ravers to snobby and trendy clubbers are falling in love with Acid Mafia’s epic discotheque jujitsu."
Suitably enough, in the spirit of Hyperboloid's very name, the rhetoric grows even more frantic: “Acid Mafia are the spiritual avant-garde of music that delivers a cryptic message from beyond consciousness itself! Every gig is both a sacred ritual and lots of fun at the same time! Introduce yourself to the extreme musical powers of Acid Mafia - straight outta Moscow!” That closing phrase is striking and immediately raises a simple question: to whom is it directed?
“Acid Mafia are the spiritual avant-garde of music that delivers a cryptic message from beyond consciousness itself! Every gig is both a sacred ritual and lots of fun at the same time! Introduce yourself to the extreme musical powers ofAcid Mafia - straight outta Moscow!
It seems reasonable to suggest a couple of intended listeners. One such group would be made from individuals not living in Moscow; the other would consist of people not even within Russia. These two factions, in turn, are also approached in different ways. The former is expected to respond with awe and admiration; the latter will - hopefully - be impressed.
If not, some fan-art at the band's Facebook page suggests some rather extreme tools of persuasion.
Take, for example, the text that closes the PR materials for this release. There's no way this calm tone of explication is designed for "provincial" listeners. Any inherent worries in the following paragraph that Acid Mafia's musical output might, allegedly, be "overly produced" are uttered in the presumed presence of a reader who might expect such excesses from Moscow. That listener is a Westerner who, in turn, might dismiss Moscow dance music as somehow lacking in finesse.
And so we're told: “'Surrogate' is dry in tone, rough and heavy, focused and simple — it’s not overly produced. That [balance of sounds] leaves various delicate subtleties and 'twisted dynamics' for an inquiring mind to investigate. There's lots of free space available for the mind to move and operate. Intricate harmonic relationships, strange rhythmic patterns, and other ambiguous shifts produce an overall feeling of attachment to a chaotic universe. This is not easy listening, but neither is smooth jazz — it's all just a matter of cultural context."
Once again, these statements, especially since they're originally penned in English(!), are directed towards a non-Russian reader, and yet they require the status of the "provinces" in order to loudly celebrate the predominance of the capital.
If we were to take an extreme view of those cultural distances - and the "chaos" they cause - we might opt for an equally recent dance release from Kazakhstan's Saha Ra, exponents of instrumental hip-hop. They, too, work within the "dramatic" context of stage-names and mythologized personae, but everything here adopts a much sleepier, suburban tone. And, for all the justifications of technical or musical expertise below, they're clearly not directed anywhere overseas!
"The group Saha Ra appeared in 2008 - in a small town on a warm July day. Two members, Kot and Banum, met with [future colleagues] Sieto and Lachetto. They showed one another some tracks and soon found a common interest. They began quietly fashioning collective material, but for a long time they either kept changing their name, or had no name at all. It's almost impossible to constrain these tracks within the confines of any one genre. The multifaceted nature of the ensemble's members makes even sub-genres insufficient. People will hear one thing only: constant experimentation."
This is less a matter of bravado than a case of being dumbstruck by the size of the opposition. The (presumed) dimensions and savvy of Moscow's artists make any clear, confident statement from the (far!) edge of the playing field very hard indeed. Judging by the image below at Saha Ra's page on Vkontakte, they have little faith in their ability to shape their own destiny, if fate - as Bulgakov once thought - lies partially in the hands of a tipsy, tubby feline.
As we can both see and hear in the Saha Ra tracks, the outfit's members are content to "orientalize" themselves, satisfying all manner of northern expectations in their (Central) Asian output, all the way from tiny finger-cymbals to towering camels. One might argue that with such imagery, a profoundly peripheral status is potentially turned on its head and made desirable through a series of alluring and "mystical, Eastern" motifs. Since, though, those same motifs are themselves the lazy product of Moscow media (e.g., cinematic comedy), what results is the sense of being dumbstruck we see in the PR materials.
No fitting forms of self-expression seem to suffice, since genres, dance movements and the like are all begun, made modish, and then jettisoned by Moscow's arbiters of taste. Nobody else gets a say in the matter.
No wonder, then, that among the "Likes and Loves" of Saha Ra we find "vinyl records and the USSR": two enduring symbols of a more homogenized and less competitive marketplace.
Both a system of state-run media and the empire thereof have vanished. All that remains are "various chaotic cultural contexts." Quite a few people remain dumbstruck.
These radical differences between swagger and shyness are caused not only by enormous distances. Let's take an alternative, less obvious kind of comparison: dance music from an under-funded DIY, equally "peripheral" or home-bound artist who nonetheless does live in Moscow. An instructive example here would be the one-woman project known as Multy, aka Mariia Solodkova. In composing her own dance music, she employs nothing more than a "cheap microphone, a laptop, and some other equipment at home."
Solodkova used to live in Novosibirsk, where she played in a "pop/rock" band. "We had some pretensions towards commercial music; it seemed the right thing to do at the time. Our approach, though, was all wrong. We wanted both fame and fortune and... of course, nothing of the sort happened." She then moved to Moscow, once bitten and already shy.
This time, stripped of all concrete plans, she happened to be at a Moscow club on one of their electronica/dance nights and only then understood how appealing work with a laptop and some software could be. "But you won't even believe the kind of stuff I'm using," she says. "My first tracks were recorded on a computer from the last century..."
My first tracks were recorded on a computer from the last century...
On these same machines she has now produced her debut EP, "Dalliance," the open tracks to which we offer here. They're part of what Solodkova sees as her "[musical] diary, which - due to my conscious carelessness - has now become public." In other words, the cold, deliberately standoffish tone of these songs is a reflection of both honesty and a necessary pose. They express the desire to both be public - in a "chaotic cultural context" - and not to be so.
The wavering in terms of social confidence is not much less than in Kazakhstan, it seems.
If things are this uncertain, what are the plans for Multy? "I want to get published, write an album, find a good label, too.... I want to be famous, become a celebrity, go on tour... The kind of tour that'll really tire me out from flying through loads of cities; the kind of tour that's made of endless countries - and hordes of fans beneath my window." At this point she laughs loudly. Both social and spatial distances make it impossible for her to stay serious.
Russian dance music, for all its Utopian yearnings, often remains frustrated on these various levels - and not only for reasons of finance. In that light, it's interesting to hear Multy's regret that she "missed the early '90s," before such disparities set in. "I'd have loved to visit those big raves! All that movement and ecstasy. I'd have really loved that: 10,000 people in one great dance beneath the rain, with the heavens looking down on them all, smiling ironically."
Sadly, the heavens' sense of irony would get a lot stronger.
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