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Nocow: "Ruins Tape" (2011)
As we've noted before on several occasions, Gimme5 is - and remains - an excellent Siberian web project, home to a decent amount of well-chosen music and media. Currently, however, the organization's main site is frozen whilst renovations are undergone. In the meantime, the staff at Gimme5 are using Bandcamp in order to advertise an intermediary release from St. Petersburg's Nocow, entitled "Ruins."
Nocow's real name is Alexei Nikitin, a man linked to various facets of the city's musical life, such as Wax Paper Cup, of whom we've also written before in approving terms. The last time he published his music through Gimme5, the compositions were described thus: "Nocow transforms sound into vivid, visual treats. In the process, he paints spacey, mechanical landscapes in your mind, allowing you to experience synesthesia without any drugs." Those same metaphors of passage or penetration are now extended with "Ruins."
Spacey, mechanical landscapes
First of all, it's worth pointing out that these recordings are described or defined en masse as a "beat tape," primarily because they're available both as a free digital download and as limited edition cassettes. Nonetheless, the lo-fi, ambient noises commonly associated with Russian tape music of the present are here employed in slightly altered forms.
Put differently, a "trip" is taken across an imaginary soundscape: paraphrasing the Gimme5 promo-text en route, we discover the promise of audible movement into "the very processes of life itself. These brief songs offer a glimpse into Nocow's vision of the world. They're like a fleeting sigh [of exasperation?] in the face of life's immense possibilities..."
Here the importance of the album's central motif comes into view, that of "ruins." In the spirit, one might argue, of some classic Romantic tropes, Nocow employs "ruins" in order to muse upon the transience of human effort. And sigh. In a world of dizzying options, the passage of time swamps any chance of grand, long-lasting enterprise. And so, instead of timeless (maybe utopian) objects of desire, effort is instead best directed towards small, modest patterns of construction. Sooner or later, nature will claim them all, turning the sturdiest of structures into ramshackle debris. Such is the meaning of crestfallen architecture, both in the nineteenth century and now - for this northern soundsmith.
Beauty within reality's ruined, decimated elements
And therefore we read (once again with a little editing): "Each track is like a pearl, born within the ugly shell of an oyster and yet beautiful in its own, unique way. In fact, these recordings ask that we seek beauty within even the most unsightly phenomena - within reality's ruined, decimated elements. Consider the artwork [shown above] as an indication of what we mean. 'Rust' is something scorned, even feared, and yet - if you look close enough - it will reveal the kind of delicate ornamentation that in fact makes it beautiful."
A similar logic can be discerned in other images that Nocow/Nikitin uses instead of self-portraits on various social networks. Visual appeal is found in the dying moments of a season - and at the close of day.
Aesthetic values and philosophical assurance are sought in unstable, fragile processes that are the very embodiment of transience. Secure views are sought in an unstable world. Hence, it would seem, a lo-fi medium (full of ambient hiss) is chosen by Nikitin specifically in order to sympathize with (and celebrate) the last, feeble moments of an earthbound process. Just before metal collapses - in ruins.
Nocow's melancholy work has appeared elsewhere of late, for example on various publications by the excellent label and artists' collective Origami Sound, based nominally in Bucharest. Origami have been responsible for a series of EPs that often include Russian artists, such as Nocow, Ilya Wazuhiru, and Moa Pillar (all showcased on our pages, too). A sixth EP will appear tomorrow, starring Fill (aka Bulb, also from St. Petersburg).
Electronic music with an emphasis upon eclecticism (Origami Sound)
The most recent of these Russian figures is a new project known as The Taiga: behind that stage-name sits Stas Hmot (Stanislav Sharifullin), who is also half of Demokracy together with Orenburg's Albert Khasanov (aka Damscray). The two musicians live some way apart: Sharifullin himself resides in the small town of Lesosibirsk.
As we've noted before, Hmot and Damscray are both fans of science fiction in various forms. They often use images of two cosmonauts working together - far from the petty burdens of terrestrial experience in the name of something loftier.
Chapter Five in the ongoing Origami Sound EPs
Their distant hometowns certainly help to underscore any imagery of romantic wandering: "We write tunes together and live in the middle of nowhere... We’re just two guys who like to play board games, drink beer, read sci-fi novels - stuff like that. To be honest, we don’t really like talking about ourselves. We operate in the kind of sphere you might call 'creative work,' but it's really too boring to discuss..."
Speaking a little more about the related, equally huge distances between the mainstream and their small, mobile forms of interaction, Hmot and Damscray have even declared: "Our country's a joke." It's too big and unruly. And that conviction is then furthered in an interview they gave to the Russian press not long ago; it brings us full circle, in fact, since these two musicians are also the driving force behind Gimme5. Less (textual) activity at that location often indicates more music from Demokracy.
We play board games, drink beer, and read sci-fi novels
If Nocow's material is currently inspired by the humbling patterns of time's inexorable flow, then for The Taiga / Stas Hmot, the focus is more upon spatial concerns. As already mentioned, it does seem easy for Hmot to conceive of his isolated hometown (below) as a distant planet, at least in terms of social connectedness. He and Khasanov speak sometimes about an inability to create lasting centers of spatial meaning, for example a local scene.
Demokracy (Stas Hmot [left] and Albert Damscray)
"Non-commercial electronic music appears to interest no more than two or three hundred people in Russia... And let's not forget that Russia is hardly Lichtenstein [in its dimensions], so those numbers are utterly comical. And if there's no demand, then [sooner or later], there won't be any supply, either." Once they contemplate the possibility of total silence, however, a little optimism emerges - just as with Nocow.
Extreme sadness, paradoxically, prompts at least a little hope: "Ultimately, that [lack of interest] doesn't concern us too much, because electronic music isn't completely tied to any one territory. It probably sounds the same to people in Novosibirsk, Los Angeles, Berlin, and Tokyo [and might, therefore, travel well]..." Any such hopes and dreams of digital expansion run parallel to Nocow's utopian thoughts of permanence. They exist at a low level.
Good sci-fi prose stopped in the late '70s (Damscray)
And for that reason it's fascinating to consider a lengthy quote used in Russian at the start of a Sharifullin track on Origami Sound. If one listens carefully, it slowly becomes clear that these lines are translated from Spanish, specifically from "Don Quixote." They are worth quoting in full for three reasons. Firstly, The Taiga himself uses them from start to finish. Secondly, these ornate considerations of reverie - as escape from both temporal and spatial constraints - end on a sobering, cautionary note. And, perhaps most importantly, they're taken from the screenplay of Tarkovsky's "Solaris" (1972) where they're used to discuss the primacy of either science or dreams.
“All I know is that while I’m asleep, I’m never afraid, and I have no hopes, no struggles, no glories — and bless the man who invented sleep, a cloak over all human thought, food that drives away hunger, water that banishes thirst, fire that heats up cold, chill that moderates passion, and, finally, universal currency with which all things can be bought, weight and balance that brings the shepherd and the king, the fool and the wise, to the same level. There’s only one bad thing about sleep, as far as I’ve ever heard, and that is that it resembles death, since there’s very little difference between a sleeping man and a corpse...”
The Russian artists on Gimme5 and Origami Sound, as we see, view their instrumental compositions with a modest, even level-headed kind of romanticism. Hope is found within rust - and creative work endures in distant towns, even if it's written for a relatively small audience. In both cases, there's an awareness that dreaming takes place in real time... over which (even) metal might disintegrate and audiences might vanish! Hence the warning in Cervantes' closing sentence not to let fantasy be detrimental to life itself. To hard work.
There’s very little difference between a sleeping man and a corpse
That same interface of imagination and industry prompts, it would seem, Sharifullin's choice of image below. He declares it to be the most beautiful picture of Krasnoyarsk. Taken at sundown, as locals start to ponder a good night's sleep, the photograph's charm lies in the combination of darkness (as slumber approaches) and points of light, needed for ongoing enterprise. The distance of these musicians from fame, fortune, and the mainstream may prompt them to occasional daydreaming - or thoughts of surrender, even - and yet, in moments of honest, unforgiving self-awareness, they realize that any effort conducted against a colorless, empty backdrop will shine that much brighter.
And so the references continue both to hard science and naive, Spanish dreamers; to intrepid cosmonauts on distant planets and corroded metal in local junkyards.
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