"Rats in the Thorax" and Other Speech Defects

Until recently there existed an instrumental project from Moscow called Monroe's Pills (Tabletki dlia Monro); sadly, they have recently disbanded. The resulting dissipation of effort, however, is already taking new and productive forms in a couple of ventures. One of these is the young ensemble known as Chinese Kite, led by Pills' guitarist and pianist Mikhail Mishin.

Thus far Chinese Kite have established a MySpace page with just over 3 minutes(!) of live work on display; to this we can add a few new pages at Live Journal or Look at Me, but in essence they announce the same brief information: an EP will be forthcoming very soon. Things have only just begun.

The other new collective belongs to what used to be the technically gifted 33% of Monroe's Pills, Aleksandr Kletsov, shown in the photograph above. Mr. Kletsov, responsible for all programming work behind his now defunct ensemble, has moved on to another endeavor. Having learned of such plans, we were immediately keen to hear the results. Quite where, though, an erstwhile member of Monroe's Pills might travel creatively is always going to be difficult to predict.

That difficulty is easy enough to explain. When we wrote about the threesome back in the first few weeks of 2009, we praised their debut EP highly since it failed, deliberately, to recognize the limitations of standard rubrics. The mountainous obstacles of stylistic norms were sidestepped with grace and daring. Titled "Pets' Riot," that Pills EP had scrambled back and forth between elements of idm, drone, Krautrock and other options.

At the time of our earlier scribblings, we also noted that the trio's music drew "some bold and disconcerting connections between comfort and collapse." Put differently, those tracks - layered with white noise, field sounds, glitch, and feedback - would adopt the restrictions of a given style only in order to debunk them, seconds later. The comfort of standardization was somehow tied to its immediate, if not inevitable collapse.

Below we suggest some reasons why.

A love/hate relationship with limitations - and therefore with any ability to communicate clearly! - was evident even in the band's earlier name. The very phrase "Monroe's Pills" contained a huge contradiction: it evoked both an object of yearning (the pleasing pills, themselves offered to a figure of desire, too) and a fatal consequence. One might even argue that a certain misogyny lurked behind those two words, in that the band named itself after a mode of both pleasure and presumed destruction, i.e., something loved and loathed.

The limitations, so to speak, or bonds to a given individual are both wanted and - then, swiftly - deliberately wasted; this is music of both passion and repulsion, often operating with equal force.

This tension between desire and destruction was clearest of all on two tracks from "Pets Riot": “Antennas of the Soviet Ships” and “Reconstruction of the Pripyat.” As we noted in 2009, "the former uses barely audible Russian monologues and the crackle of maritime radios to embody disparate, disconnected parts of language that are barely able to stay in touch.  The two core elements of a dialog float further away from one another."

The former uses barely audible Russian monologues and the crackle of maritime radios to embody disparate, disconnected parts of language that are barely able to stay in touch. The two core elements of a dialog float further away from one another.

These themes endure with Kletsov. In the new image below, for example, two figures - seemingly robbed of speech - admit to one another in dumb visual terms that they simply "don't know" what to say. The second image is suggestive of a bigger communicative loss, of submission to something grander than one's self-control and/or self-expression.

These silent figures give up on speech - and then give in altogether.

This desire both to socialize - and therefore accept the restrictions of speech and/or genres - whilst also loathing those same limitations is constantly evident in Aleksandr Kletsov's new project. Called "Blind Women," this outfit, consisting predominantly of Kletsov himself, has just gathered ten fresh instrumentals lasting almost one hour and collectively known as "Rats in the Thorax."

It's hard to imagine a designation that would speak with greater drama and directness to the communicative contradictions that so interested "Monroe's Pills." And, just as before, these brand-new works do not fit tidily within generic confines.

The restrictions of standard styles are placed to one side, yet always threaten to impose themselves - as soon as that work is made public and thus "assessed" or categorized. Silence would appear a better option, as the three minor figures below suggest.

Especially the third from the left.

We asked Mr. Kletsov whether there were any supporting textual materials for the new project, over and above the audio tracks, especially since "Blind Women" have yet to establish any web pages for themselves. He said that work is currently ongoing with regard to the album's graphics, and he kindly provided us with the images in this post.

In other words, we find ourselves not only continuing the communicative dilemmas of a prior project, but also employing a visual context for the music, rather than a verbal one. We find ourselves, therefore, in between bands, genres, and socializing tools. This might, one could argue, be the best possible location for creative freedom, prior to restrictive naming, listing, or tagging.

A "hopeful new home" with no real address. The promise of a blank page.

And indeed these new tracks do slide back and forth across virgin territory, moving between a wide range of untried styles. In this post we use the first six instrumentals from the album (that has yet to exist...).

The opening composition at the top of our post, "Do Not Trust Man [sic] with Big Scissors," starts with a garbled, almost asphyxiated attempt to enunciate some basic phrasing. It fails, and the tracks fall angrily into some looping, lurching riffs after a couple of minutes.

It stars Kletsov's old colleague, Mikhail Mishin, on guitar.

This might appear to presage a hypnotic, mesmerizing album of metronomic Kraut-chords (a la Mox, perhaps), but already the second number throws a spanner in the works. The picture below makes evident Mr. Kletsov's desire to fashion constant "plans of [artistic] escape" that are endlessly, inevitably scuppered by the fact they need to be written down or expressed out loud. For every option that is spoken, published, or performed, thousands are not. The minute we open our mouth, endless potential becomes the sad and sorry option of something in particular.

Two pencils lie beside the carnage of a creative plan or "escape" that's cut down by the simple fact it even started.

Hence the radical zipping back and forth between expressive opposites; it's the desperate avoidance of a dead end.

Track #2, titled - hopefully with some irony - as "Sexy Nuns" - offers more than 3 minutes of organ work and brushes that toy with a lounge aesthetic(!), interrupted only once by the briefest sample of an American female voice: "Wait a minute," she says. That phrase, to a large degree, sums up the entire album, full of stops, starts, and the same love/hate attitude to any kind of expressive ability. There are equal, angrily competing needs here to both speak and say nothing, a simultaneous struggle between involvement and independence. (The rhythms of that struggle, by the way, are syncopated by another old workmate, Evgenii Grin'ko, of whom we've written elsewhere.)

This conundrum is a wound that never heals. Every time it draws attention to itself with one verbal or expressive option, the key paradoxes come back into play.

This struggle increases across the album, established by the track titles, if nothing else. Amid the breakdown of any predictable patterns ("Robots Are Dying"), all comforting sense of social membership (of childhood, perhaps?) is erased: a "Lullaby" becomes a "Hellaby," fulls of poorly tuned xylophones, music boxes, and nightmarish vocals.

This persecution complex, maybe, endures in the latter numbers, too, such as "Childhood in the Forest," "Policemen'll Kill Me Tomorrow," and - predictably enough - the title track, "Rats." Here the choking, strangled attempts to speak from the opening number are made much more dramatic.

Language, by emitting any kind of sound, instigates its own demise. The mouth hurts itself.

This downward spiral accelerates. What sounds like an adult in genuine danger of choking soon collapses into the repeated noun of the title: "Rats, rats, rats..."

The entire album - which, as mentioned, has yet to commit itself to that designation! - remains as powerful as the "Pets Riot" EP that Monroe's Pills managed to publish before they - like their Ukrainian "nuclear" metaphors - fell foul of the inherent tensions between emission and implosion.

Deepest of all these conflicts, now as before, is the paradoxical relationship between commitment and "freedom," between the commitment to a given expression, genre, or individual and the subsequent self-hatred, even, once such that "sacrifice" has been made. The high level of self-harm in these images is eloquent proof thereof.

This same dilemma did Monroe's Pills a lot of harm, too. The greatest irony here, it seems, is that the very production of this music instigates its demise. To speak is to realize the paucity of speech; to even start a performance is invite a closing number.

To stand up is to fall down. Better, therefore, to lie silently in a state where anything might happen.