|
Playone (Pavel Lenchenko, Kiev)
Three recordings this week from Kiev, Murmansk, and Tallinn form an interesting trio in their attitudes towards dance music as escapism. Working in between the upbeat heritage of house and dubstep's more anxious range, these musicians all view the dancefloor as a microcosm of larger social spheres. Attitudes towards social potential in a club environment speak - directly or otherwise - to civic potentials.
We start in the Ukrainian capital, home of Pavel Lenchenko, who is better known to local audiences as one third of Tomato Jaws (shown below). It's important to stop and consider his solo endeavors, too, since Lenchenko has a considerable role to play in his own right. Although he refers to himself, with scant modesty, as "one of the nation's finest exponents of house music," there may in actual fact be some justification to that claim. In distancing himself both from local competition and his traditional obligations within Tomato Jaws, Mr. Lenchenko performs under the stage name of Playone.
One of Ukraine's finest exponents of house music
To a large degree, Playone is a typical figure of post-Soviet song and music in that his skills have been almost entirely forged outside of any institutional setting. The decentralization of professional education and the birth of web-based media since the end of the Soviet Union both seriously undermined the affordability and relevance of formal training for many musicians in Eastern Europe. Effort outside the classroom seemed more immediate and appealing than three years in a dusty lecture hall. As we see below.
And so, at the callow age of seventeen, Lenchenko already had enough DIY material to constitute an album. Those earliest recordings, by his own admission, reflected the fleeting modishness of jungle. Over time, though - and certainly by 2006 - his efforts had led towards more of a house sound. These tentative steps towards the mainstream appeared simultaneously with new, adult burdens - such as the need to fund one's lifestyle away from home. As a result, short and profitable jingles were written for a range of radio and TV commercials; actuality would not leave much room for quiet contemplation - it needed to be subsidized.
Today his growing influence - first across local and then national dancefloors - has led to experience on a European scale. Lenchenko has performed in various countries around the continent, whilst adding to the house compositions in his Playone catalog. Currently they number more than fifty. And then, to these physical movements around the map, we should also add web-based collaborations with artists from the US, Germany, Finland, England, and France.
Success in professional realms is reflected in Lenchenko's newest recording, "Magenta." These three instrumentals, running at almost 22 minutes, draw upon the positive contradictions within tech-house as style of approachable compromise. The elitist severity of techno is softened here by the more accessible, warmer aspects of a house tradition. Tech-house per se is arguably a style designed for broader appeal, and therefore contains a more upbeat view of social realms. Even in the EP's artwork (below), we sense a belief that subjectivity benefits from social contact. We see a handful of figures, positioned upon a barren landscape... and yet, when they encounter their own reflection, monochrome individuals gain a wealth of vibrant colors. Self-awareness, gained interactively, is improved awareness.
To what degree, though, is that social optimism a consequence of the tangible realms in which it's fashioned? Put differently, does an escapist style find itself influenced by the very address it's trying to sidestep? It's useful here to ponder some equally new house recordings - from much further afield. More specifically, we have in mind the duo known as AN:TI - Aleksandr Moskovchenko and Iaroslav Shalev. Both of these man are residents of Murmansk, which is the largest city in the Arctic Circle. Almost one thousand miles north of Moscow...
The last time we looked at these musicians' catalog, we remarked that in recent years, the polar location of Murmansk and a related, bone-chilling climate have together made the region unappealing for younger people. Many have moved away. The population continues to shrinks at a depressingly constant rate, but our two artists remain homebound. AN:TI adopt a contrary attitude towards their severe surroundings. That contrariness often takes the audible, persistent forms of tech- or deep-house and even synth-pop.
This week AN:TI have published a four-track, 29-minute EP peppered with brief vocal snippets from a range of US dancefloor tracks. First and foremost among them is the phrase heard in the opening composition, "Anything": "I can be anything that you want..." Over more than five minutes, however, it is looped so often that a declaration of freedom becomes at first insistent and then almost mantric in its repetition. Which leads us to the thematic emphases of the tracklist: "Anything," "Party," "Karma," "Game of the Soul." All of a sudden, we're looking for an emancipatory sensation far beyond the physical allure of standard dancefloor enterprise.
Indeed, the very association of dance music with material "gain" is viewed askance by these northern DJs. Take the artwork above: very gaudy colors, awkwardly combined perspectives, and a range of wholly unnatural situations all help to create a healthy distance between these instrumentals and some magical, almost delusional realm full of stallions, footballs(!), and helicopters. Such are the ungainly dreams of bedroom-bound romantics, armed with an iPod, glue, and scissors. It's very much a pre-adult, cut-and-paste narrative, frozen in time.
A related, profoundly domestic romance - face to face with social realia - is evident from the streets of Tallinn this week, where we find the artist known as [Scio] - whose first name is Maxim. His musings upon the outside world are explicitly conducted "from the darkness of a home studio." Here in the Estonian capital [Scio] spins compositions that move from classic house to what he calls a melange of "dubstep, trip-hop, and even punk" elements. The final style in that wayward list implies that any relationship with social existence will be feistier from the outset. Life looks unappealing outside the bedroom window.
House, dubstep, trip-hop, and even punk
As with AN:TI, this artist takes pleasure from the simplicity of a few appealing "Asian" stereotypes. Over and above the cosmetic reference points we see below, or their operatic origins, [Scio] admits that his music is best written with no more than "good green- or herbal tea," together with the "company of some positive people." That throwaway closing observation actually takes on a special significance. Music designed to escape the here and now, it transpires, actually needs the co-presence of others. Should those individuals present not be of "positive" mindset, then - implicitly - romantic reverie would be at an immediate disadvantage.
This closer bond to the lives, views, and unrequested influence of others is equally clear in [Scio]'s creative biography, which begins with a youthful enthusiasm for the UK rave scene. (That anglophile bent is still important today in that he records for the Bedford-based Dubzilla label.) The noisy British subculture for which [Scio] once had such affection developed amid some masochistic, even self-destructive attempts to erase quotidian experience. One need only recall the public furor over PMA- or ecstacy-related deaths in the press. Using the rationale of [Scio]'s's brief observations, we might conclude that the calm and "karmic" potential of which we hear in Murmansk is much harder to cultivate once people are stuck within an urban context. Ostensible reality weighs heavily upon the discontents.
Industrial-sounding and full of urban tension
The best way, therefore, to avoid the Big City is to leave it. Physically. And only then consider one's musical accompaniment. [Scio]'s own, increasing need to find a stylistically appropriate response to intrusive actuality meant that by the age of ten(!), he had allegedly sampled, cut, and pasted every sound in his record collection. Now, as he continues fashioning a sonic lexicon to match the (pushy) nature of everyday public spheres, his aesthetic becomes "more industrial-sounding and full of urban tension."
A monochrome palette serves to underscore the growing severity.
Any civic optimism evident in the upbeat house tracks of Kiev's Playone (Pavel Lenchenko) is nonetheless nuanced by some graphic forms of expression - within an imagined wilderness. His chosen artwork contextualizes those sounds. Vivid, chromatic shapes of self-awareness come into being (far) away from urban pushing or shoving; distance is both aestheticized and romanticized.
[Scio], whose catalog is rooted in the desperate escapism of '90s UK rave, still feels - despite years with other, more optimistic aspects of dancefloor culture - that the ominous, "industrial" basslines of dubstep are perhaps the best and/or most appropriate response to actuality. Only when we move to the Arctic Circle(!) do we find sufficient distance from material matters to not only mock expensive excess, but also to consider a "karmic" potential within 4x4 beats and looped vocals. Endlessly repeated statements sound truer.
The escapist potential of these recordings, therefore, remains a precious ideal. It needs, however, a little help. In order for notions of "reverie" or "liberty" to move from cliche to reality, a total - physical - avoidance of the Big City is required. Escapist sounds are most convincing once their listener has already fled the world of steel, concrete, and carbon monoxide. Consider, therefore, these house, tech-house, and dubstep instrumentals a fitting soundtrack en route to the railway station... or whatever form of transport is locally available.
Murmansk, 927 miles north of Moscow
Comments
Login / Register