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Sablia, as we've mentioned before, is a project grounded in the songwriting skills of two individuals: Galia Chikiss and Arsenii K., frontman of St Petersburg ensemble Padla Bear Outfit. Together these performers have just finished a new album - or a lengthy EP, depending upon one's viewpoint. Made of seven songs and lasting just under thirty minutes, it can be downloaded for free from various locations.
Given, however, that free availability, promotional materials are thin on the ground. The traditional connection in PR departments between verbosity and potential profit is removed; there's no need to say much, since there's no monetary gain. In fact, there's no gain whatsoever - and therefore silence is more evident than chit-chat.
Consequently, we're offered nothing more than the following paragraph, uploaded without fuss in order to introduce an EP that's already inspiring loud praise in quiet places. The album's title - in English - translates as "When There's No Rhyme for the Word 'Money.'" Our slim promo-paragraph plays on that title; it begins with scant concern for elegant shoptalk.
"When mountains of crap turn into gold. When mountains of money turn into crap. When there's no rhyme for the word 'money'! This is an EP from the band known as Sablia. It continues the ideas of 'mortgage punk' to the accompaniment of howling reverb and the hacking sounds of delay. You'll hear everything on this record: rock, pop, country, dub, avant garde, soul, and ambient sounds, too... Elochnye Igrushki have also remixed the title track; it sounds like the kind of whining noise you'd get from the cell phone of a southern market trader."
You'll hear everything on this record: rock, pop, country, dub, avant garde, soul, and ambient sounds, too...
"There's a ridiculous exclamation mark at the end of the EP's title, too - as if it's pondering itself. Will the people to whom that title's addressed actually understand it? Our sound engineer was Oleg Baranov, who used to be with Tequilajazzz. The track entitled 'Lena Smirnova' is a cover-version of a song by the band 'Chekhov' - who vanished some time during the last decade. Our own decade is passing too quickly..."
The reference is "mortgage punk" is something that we covered before. It arose not long in an interview we arranged with Galia Chikiis. She defined it as follows, writing to us from this very apartment.
"Mortgage punk is a clear and straightforward definition of the idea behind Sablia. There was a good reason for it, too. Partly it resulted from my family and social status: I’m a wife and mother who stays at home in order to raise her daughter – while the husband earns money, working in an office job. As far as I’m concerned, though, he’s a very creative and talented person, who makes all of my concert footage."
"Living in Russia, however, you’ll never survive through video art alone: we’ve got a mortgage, and we need to work hard. Trouble is, we’re very laid-back individuals, kind of outsiders."
"This imbalance and sense of involuntary, private protest was something that Arsenii noticed even when we first met. It was he who suggested the idea of Sablia at a concert that Padla Bear Outfit and [my own band] Chikiss did together. The band’s moniker and concept of 'mortgage punk' were invented quickly – we were happy with them from the outset. It’s something that people understand, a topic that’s close to their hearts. It’s a kind of self-mockery, a sort of laughing at yourself - and at others like you. We do it in ways that are melodic, easy-going, and catchy, too."
It’s a kind of self-mockery, a sort of laughing at yourself - and at others like you
And so this EP is full of songs about the connection between finance and forms of social drudgery, such as journeys on pubic transport, endless road trips to see friends, tedious shopping runs and so forth. All of those themes are treated with the kind of distance or standoffishness that turns into reverb and delay.
Strange activities are expressed with strange sounds.
This same distancing technique - expressing isolation with muffled, lo-fi sound - has coincidentally been repeated in Moscow, thanks to the efforts of semi-anonymous duo Luau. Some detective work has revealed the members' names, but little additional information is available. The absence of accompanying texts, for example, is almost complete. It's only possible to say with confidence that Luau consist of Anton Obrazeena (on drums) and a female colleague, Nastya Etoya on guitar.
Words are neither sung nor written. The image above shows them in a suitably tight-lipped pose.
Together they play distorted tributes to surf-guitar anthems of the early 1960s. Here, too, there's reverb galore. The original instrumentals of fifty years ago used that technique because it - allegedly - mirrored the sound of the surf. Now, though, as with Sablia, that unpolished echo invokes once more a feeling of distance - both spatially and socially.
The lifestyle of southern California is so far away it can only be treated with mild cynicism and irony. In that light, it's interesting to note that Obrazeena also performs with Moscow math-rock staples Prea Hrada: the distance from ironic romance to disorienting complexity is apparently small...
In the briefest of statements, Luau inform us: "We play surf, punk, and noise-pop. We listen to No Age and bands from the '60s, too. We love [Fender] Jazzmasters, Mustangs, and Jaguars: they're just so good-looking... We are Anton and Nastya: we try to play this way."
We play surf, punk, and noise-pop... We love [Fender] Jazzmasters, Mustangs, and Jaguars
For all the doubt and irony, therefore, the workings of romance stay in place; our musicians - by their own admission - still try. Distanced from any sense of membership at home (amid mortgage papers and Coke bottles), the yearning to be somewhere else still endures. The actual belief in such a move, though, is minimal: hence the great tunes and the distortion - at the same time.
Returning to the Sablia EP, it would indeed appear that there's no clear rhyme for the Russian word "money." Fiscal matters are too far from the world of starry-eyed romantics and poets. Since life in a material society does not lend itself to verse, we're offered music instead. We're offered the kind of troubled, messy sounds that embody both a treasured idea and - as Sablia mentioned - "mountains of crap." Negative possibilities bog down the optimists all too often.
As the band's cover art implies, for all the faith and fearlessness of our driver, it really doesn't look like he'll make it...
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