Love Songs as Correspondence: Sansara, Dolphin, and Chaos in Heathrow

The new, eponymous album from Sansara (2011)

Yekaterinburg's Sansara just announced the publication of a new album. It is available for downloading through the voluntary payment scheme ThankYou.Ru. This recording involved a wide range of contemporaries - themselves from a host of surrounding cities: Galya Chikiss, 7he Myriads, Obe Dve, Mars Needs Lovers, Red Samara Automobile Club, and others. Recent singles and EPs by Sansara have also involved St. Petersburg's Elochnye Igrushki and Pes i Gruppa....

To that impressive list we can then add the collective Gornostay, in which Sansara's frontman Aleksandr Gagarin has participated of late. In short, an enormous amount of activity separates the release of these new songs and Sansara's previous CD, published a couple of years ago.

Twelve new songs about death and flowers

Listeners are promised "Twelve new songs about death and flowers, love and geniuses, illusions and the zombie-like qualities in all of us. These are twelve dances around issues of trust, diamond-like logic, and inner beauty." Attributes of romantic uniqueness are thus discerned "in all of us." The hyperbolic tone in which they're expressed suggests the degree of effort needed by romance to push hard against actuality. These, in other words, are the anthems of gifted, yet tragically misunderstood outsiders - as the best and wittiest pop songs always are. Majesty and self-mockery look each other in the eye.

Sansara at work, 2011

The links between Mr. Gagarin and his snowballing workforce were fashioned both during touring and thanks to technology. He has recently reminded listeners in various interviews that concert and festival duties in 2010-2011 took Sansara from one end of Russia to the other. Initial acquaintances, begun in those far-flung locales, gradually became productive relationships and collaborations, often with the help of file-sharing software.

By the band's own admission these novel forms of interaction, at least in the short term, have already started to replace any traditional line-up on stage. A singular group, in the traditional sense, has become a network. As Gagarin said to the Russian press: "My side-projects simply come to fruition within Sansara: that's why the band is constantly changing." 

This celebration of fluid, mobile interaction is reflected even graphically. The new album has no fixed artwork: listeners can instead combine their own photographs with the diamond design we see at the top of this page, thus merging their private imagery with that of a (public) band. 

My side-projects simply come to fruition within Sansara

"Sansara" contains several of the group's singles that were published over the last twenty-four months. One of the most salient - thematically speaking - remains "Restlessness/ A Gong's Echo" (Непокой/ Эхом Гонга). Both of those songs were taken from the catalog of Mumiy Troll and the pen of Il'ia Lagutenko; the latter number is an older, almost archival work, whereas the former was from Mumiy Troll's "Sliianie i Pogloshchenie" (Mergers and Acquisitions, 2005). The imagery used within that single now informs the new album, just as Gagarin's side-projects inform Sansara.

Fragments contribute to a whole.

Sansara taking a curtain call at a 2011 festival

More specifically, for the members of Sansara those two compositions recall a road trip they made maybe six years ago to the coast of the Black Sea. The musicians offer a little context:

"The song 'Restlessness' was somewhere towards the end of an album's running order. [As we drove southwards] it started playing at that precise moment when we finally left the winding mountain roads and saw the sea... Our single involves several versions of that same song: they're designed both for a man and a woman. They work together like a sort of 'audio-correspondence.' The man writes to the woman and vice versa... And then, after that dialog, we also get some variations on the same [epistolary] theme."

The songs work together like a sort of 'audio-correspondence'

This dialogic structure, made from small "correspondences," was nicely formalized by the folks at Russian webzine The Spot. "This Sansara single opens with a sad, 'female' version of the text: a girl addresses her boyfriend. It's a sincere, melancholy kind of expression, constantly interrupted by the mournful sounds of falling rain. Listening to this material, one can imagine a miserable, rainy summer's day, with the threat of thunder somewhere. There's a girl, staring from a window into the distance...

...and hoping the rain will stop.

Aleksandr Gagarin

A rich imagination continues to paint a helpful picture of how these love songs give voice to a kindly interaction: "Next we're offered the 'male' section of the single's dialog[ic structure]. This is a rather anxious, even hysterical plea for love; it's meant for the young woman in question. Perhaps she hears some echo of this heartfelt suffering across the miles." Mr. Gagarin now shows how those echoes take shape across an entire CD, altering the "illusions or zombie-like qualities in all of us" with a small, social hope for something better.

Some related themes of interaction are certainly audible in the new album from Dolphin (Дельфин), otherwise known as Andrei Lysikov, whose career began in Russia of the 1990s. His newest recording - "Sushchestvo" (tr. "Essence" or "Being") - is his seventh CD, although strictly speaking it is more of a digital diptych, the first half of which we have here. The songs were written and recorded by Lysikov, guitarist Pavel Dodonov (of Toho-Do), and sound engineer Renat Ibragimov.

Themes of solitude and estrangement: the utter isolation of a human heart

A basic outline for the CD was well sketched a few days ago by Moscow magazine Open Space: "The opening tracks frame some core themes of solitude and estrangement: the utter isolation of a human heart, even, as it seeks understanding (somewhere other than among the flowers of an open field)." That borderline romantic hyperbole will, once more, be countered as it is with Sansara, i.e., by using the imagery of some imagined dialog. 

Expressed differently, part two of "Sushchestvo" is supposed to be much more positive - and designed as a counterweight. Two voices and viewpoints will form a unified whole, although in the meantime Mr. Lysikov's t-shirt shows scant faith in interaction.

Andrei Lysikov, aka Dolphin

Some other, related topics from Gagarin's catalog also emerge, such as the celebration of endlesss metamorphosis - at the expense of any unidirectional "progress." Stylistic challenges are discussed in terms of a centrifugal movement, outwards into an unfamiliar environment. Expansion or extension is valued over unidirectional, goal-driven movement, at least metaphorically: an increasingly "networked" experience comes to the fore in terms of morphing, fluid patterns. Alterations are more appealing than advancement:

Lysikov says: "I feel those sorts of change every single day. They're gradual, yet constant. In other words, I might have been a certain kind individual five years ago but then - all of a sudden! - I'll become somebody else. And [en route to that epiphany] I feel every day that at least something should be done in a novel or new manner..." 

Truly appealing people are few in number...

As suggested in our songs from Yekaterinburg, those private metamorphoses are - ideally - fostered socially, among rare, kindred spirits in a rather threatening world. "It's always nice meeting people from whom you can learn something. They're the ones who appeal to me most: folks who know things I don't, or can do stuff I can't! I've always been attracted to them... but they're few in number."

Hence the album's artwork, taken from Da Vinci's "Madonna and Child," which is kept in the Hermitage.  The museum itself discerns, within that small frame, "the Madonna's sublime, tender gaze - as she looks at her son." More importantly, that motif is matched or echoed by "the tranquillity of a distant, mountainous landscape, reflecting dreams of an 'ideal man' and a 'harmonious life.'" 

The ideal, in other words, remains distant.

Dolphin: "Sushchestvo" (2011)

So distant, in fact, that Dolphin has said he'd be happy to emigrate from Russia, yet understands that career options and family obligations make that move unlikely. In a difficult land or troublesome social sphere, "attractive" and inspiring contacts will only become increasingly precious. The album's artwork has already transferred them to the realm of divinity.

Rita Popova, Chaos in Heathrow (2011)

The moniker under which she currently performs was - allegedly - chosen as a parallel to her musical instruments: "Both [airports and pianos!] require a certain discipline and coordination in their actions, otherwise heaven only knows what'll happen!" A sense of purpose grows from tentative social contact. The press in Popova's hometown of Velikii Novgorod has already written that she sings "outward," into the crowd - who in turn take great pleasure from responding in kind. Audience members sing along to the numbers they know, be they from the '30s or later and gentler times (such as the Thaw). 

In both those cases and lyrical traditions, a small and trusting social sphere is discerned through verbal exchange: strangers cohere in the desire to sing (to one another!) of love and fidelity, using some well-known, comforting tales from a much tougher decade. Faith and trust are slowly nurtured through unexpected and fleeting dialogs.

We can see from these ensembles and artists the very high regard in which momentary friendship and flirting are held. Some very hyperbolic language is applied to them both. There's a good reason why Sansara would want to fill an album of "death and flowers" with celebrations of the shortest, yet most vivid correspondence. A postcard can do a great deal in a challenging world.  

As can a mobile photo.

Chaos in Heathrow, backstage in Moscow