New Breakcore: Graffiti on Maiakovskii Square

The RusZud label recently released an intriguing new breakcore compilation, entitled "Moscow Breakcore Masscare."  It features 18 new tracks from almost as many artists and has - as we see - a rather bizarre cover, too.  Front and center is a well-known statue of poet Vladimir Maiakovskii (1893-1930), surrounded by large explosions, engravings of angels, evidently peeved serpents, and 19th-century engineering sketches.  At the foot of this inexplicable melange of things divine, hellish, and mechanical are a couple of male DJs, with human hands and piscine bodies.  

Clearly there are surprises ahead.

The biggest of these is perhaps the back cover (which we'd rather not show you).  It contains a picture of Beavis holding a chainsaw to the edge of an old vinyl 45, which produces jagged red soundwaves.  Over his exposed brain, decorated with rubber plungers, is a severed part of the male anatomy (i.e., someone else's!); it is flying by with great speed, having been recently detached from its owner.  What on earth this all means is unclear, until we take a look at the tracklisting.  Track #16, the longest and most intricate on the album, is by Moscow's Gnomcorps (below); its title makes reference to a "Gay Parade on Maiakovskii Square," where our statue is located in Moscow.  

That event and place, despite recent troubles regarding gay meetings or related celebrations in the city, appear to be fictitiously linked.  What, however, remains beyond debate is a sense of unease.  The CD's animated representative is clearly troubled by the idea of Maiakovskii Square being filled with "undesirables" - and so he strolls the streets with major hardware, just in case. 

Beavis and Butthead appear on several of these tracks as samples or sound bytes, together with other markers of an older, Soviet childhood.  The theme tunes of animated TV series are especially prominent, such as the nationally famous "Jolly Carousel" (Veselaia karusel') programs that began at the end of the 1960s and ran regularly until 2002.  They consisted of a few cartoon shorts bundled together as a mini-almanac and, over the thirty years of their existence, gave birth to an entire soundtrack for children growing up in socialist Russia and beyond.  

Other animated traditions from today's less closeted, web-savvy childhood are also on display here, for example Ilaria Graziano's song from the Japanese TV series Ghost in the Shell (Sand Alone Complex), shown below.  On this occasion it comes wrapped in a remix from England's Kamikaze Deadboy (Halifax).

These and many other echoes from one's early years are subjected to a genuine thumping from all manner of beats, occasionally with such insistence or distortion that the high voices of the cartoon samples, together with abusive, neo-Neanderthal drumming, sends us off in the general direction of happy hardcore.  

In addition, it's worth mentioning that many of the tracks sound less as if they've been remixed than subjected to a new layer or tracks or beats.  We can still discern the original works, often playing without interruption, but a veil of thumps, bumps, and bangs now accompanies them.  Needless to say, the effect is often comic, no matter the degree of angry violence applied to the originals. 

This is because breakcore itself frequently employs humor, in that its speed is mapped out with some of D&B's more familiar building blocks.  The better-known, if not cliched breaks of D&B are laughed out of town, so to speak.  They're played so fast they can't be taken seriously, nor do they want to be.  Breakcore takes very few things at face value, and in that respect its role in the Russian context is telling.

The social desires of childhood are now subject to aural graffiti on this net-release, to malicious laughter, even,  while - according to the compilation's cover - we then go out onto Maiakovskii Square and do similar violence to troubling aspects of adult life.  In fact it makes more sense if we reverse those two phenomena and look at the chainsaw as a tool used to purge any sense of upset caused by failed aspirations from a pre-adult period of innocent planning.  

We take out our frustrations on the present, because the past let us down.  Naive cartoons proved bad (or unworldly) tutors; we now feel marginalized.  As a consequence, today we use dangerous, more cynical animated heroes to destroy those members of another peripheral group who do appear to be gaining acceptance.

And, if we accept that comparison with graffiti or spiteful tagging, it's perhaps instructive to recall that - in the Slavic context - those kinds of public scribbles go back to inscriptions found on the walls of Kievan churches, where ancient appeals to Higher Powers were scraped or chiseled into white stone blocks.  Writing anonymously, often at night, people worried about events in the present and  - with their surreptitious, illegal words - would try to increase degrees of control over the future.  They ignored social law in order to invoke fairer powers.  According to that same analogy, breakcore is increasingly frustrated by the dimensions of others' creativity, and so (at least in cartoons) it turns to illegal violence in the name of something "fairer."

We include several pictures of Maiakovskii Square for you, in case you stumble onto it by accident.  Invest in a chainmail T-shirt, just in case.  As you can see below, the square has a history of social unrest.  There's a chainsaw in there somewhere...