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Entrance to the Ozerne airbase, Ukraine
Near the Ukrainian city of Zhytomyr is a small town known as Ozerne, with only a few thousand residents. What makes Ozerne important, despite that size, is the manner of local enterprise. Military aircraft have been housed here since 1965, although the nature and number of those planes has changed over the decades, depending upon the political climate. In fact, even the surrounding buildings are an echo of social history, in that several of them were built by Ukrainian prisoners during WWII. This occurred when the region was under German occupation - and an invading force needed bigger, better aerodromes.
From that loud, pragmatic, and very serious location come some contrary sounds. They can be attributed to a small outfit known as Phooey! Although the folks involved make no effort to advertise themselves, we've already been able to ascertain that Phooey! is actually a solo project of local musician Nikita Ogurtsov, who likes to define these lo-fi, shambling songs as "contemporary indie pop with some folkish elements."
Contemporary indie pop with some folkish elements
A little more digging online reveals a barely audible admission that these same tunes are also inspired by Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and Tom Waits. The level of seriousness in such statements, however, is probably low. These Ukrainian works are reflective of a simple, even touching lyricism, rather than of any social agenda. They also suggest that a bona fide American folk narrative might sound rather silly when sung from the middle of a Slavic field, and so Mr. Ogurtsov tags his output elsewhere as "boring" or even "dull music" (seraia muzyka).
Self-mockery is more evident than self-importance (as if that weren't obvious from the artwork).
Making the same, self-deprecating point in even clearer terms, Ogurtsov releases these songs on nearby Pathetic Records. One Russian social network gives the label an opportunity to define itself as "a pitiful enterprise, of no use to anybody. Pathetic Records are based in the Ukrainian provinces or, to be more specific, in Ozerne. The label is far from your standard DIY project; we don't for example, use our parents' money to cover distribution costs. And we certainly don't release run-of-the-mill hardcore cr*p for morons. What we do is something more. (But, to be honest, we don't yet know what...)."
A pitiful enterprise, of no use to anybody
The newest Phooey! recordings can now be downloaded for free. They are twelve in number, chosen from an earlier, much longer tracklist of twenty-five songs (and a Johnny Cash cover). What we hear, therefore, is already the superior end of Ogurtsov's output...
A related project - from an equally noisy address - has just appeared in the guise of CAWA, who is another solo musician, this time based in Moscow. That capitalized moniker, it's worth pointing out, is presumably a play upon the boy's name "Sasha," which in Russian typography appears as "САША." From the outset, therefore, a laddish awkwardness hangs over the songs - as an inability to even type one's name properly... on anything other than a cellphone keyboard. This young performer, in a similarly clueless fashion, offers no indication of his surname or web-resources. The songs he currently publishes, compiled with no evident effort, are simply uploaded - for those who might happen to come across them by chance.
CAWA (Moscow)
His music is tagged with the generic markers of "post-chanson," "singer-songwriter," and "sludge-bard." The imprecise nature of those categories is reflected in the songs' words, too. This time in Russian, not English, CAWA's lyrical musings speak to an enduring sense of homelessness. By way of illustration, an opening track is set amid the rushing crowds and cold, windy streets of the capital: our lyric hero has absolutely no sense of where he belongs. Being in Moscow is, apparently, not terribly different to the "backwaters of Ukraine" in that a feeling of disconnectedness endures in the work of both these songwriters. As do the "dull, tedious" or deadpan vocals.
Songs tagged as 'post-chanson' and 'sludge-bard'
As another of the early songs informs (or warns) us: "Breathe the air here - it's full of pain!" Elsewhere, in avoidance of that discomfort, CAWA asks to be "placed under lock and key... Lock me up in sadness," he says, simply because there are insufficient drugs to endure the colorless misery of daily life.
And yet, despite this growing level of drama - at least thematically - the songs themselves are delivered with a twee, sometimes resigned voice. And that brings us to the new album by St. Petersburg's SBPCh (Samoe Bol'shoe Prostoe Chislo), who are arguably the best-known exponents of an emotionally "flattened" or deadpan treatment of R&B pop. Bling becomes banality. Entitled "Fleshka" (Flash Drive) this new SBPCh album emerges with a striking, simple cover by Omsk's Andrei Mitroshin (known to us as Milky Toad). A recent interview for Afisha magazine in Moscow has set the stage well.
SBPCh: "Fleshka" (2011)
Here - from the outset - the same lo-fi, emotionally chilly tone comes to the fore, thanks to band members Kirill Ivanov, Il'ia Baramiia, Aleksandr Zaitsev, and newcomer Aleksandra Zakharenko. Ivanov said at the beginning of the interview: "We recently came to the conclusion that you can record - and rerecord - any track a thousand times, creating a million different arrangements on the way, but ultimately you're not going to radically improve the composition in question. Either a song is good to start with, or it's bad. There's no super-duper production work that'll save bad material."
A song is either good to start with, or it's bad. Nothing will save bad material
Putting this attitude into motion, SBPCh took their cue from the 1980s' albums of rock legends Aquarium, recorded before the emergence of post-Soviet commercial studios - or even free speech - and with woefully inadequate tools. Those discs also avoided the heightened emotional tone of surrounding ideology. Zaitsev added to that retrospective analysis: "Those Aquarium albums were all strangely recorded - and strangely played, too! - but they're full of so many songs that we love. So we came to conclusion that we should do the same" - i.e., by working quickly, cheaply, and with minimum levels of lyrical pathos. In fact with almost no money, technology, or emotion at all.
Key here is the notion of "awkwardness." In other words, all members of SBPCh feel that honest expression, either on stage or in the studio, never comes from a clamorous display of bold, brash statements, even when they're made with confidently wielded technology. Quite the opposite: veracity and candor should come in humble forms.
SBPCh: left to right, A. Zaitsev, I. Baramiia, and K. Ivanov
Daily experience, being burdensome and frequently humbling, suggests that honesty and inexpert forms of minimalism might complement one another well: "That's actually one of SBPCh's most important principles. We need to keep putting ourselves in extremely awkward situations" (Ivanov), in order to assure modesty both onstage and off. Zaitsev made absolutely sure of this in the studio by asking all musicians involved not to play on their own instruments: "That way everybody made an effort, but they couldn't rely on their own cliched performance habits. It meant there was no 'safety zone' in the recording process..."
We need to keep putting ourselves in extremely awkward situations
And then comes the observation - or recollection - by SBPCh that Leo Tolstoy once described how soldiers feel both joy and fear as they walk towards a battlefield. Entrance into the disorienting plenitude of a battle, where the arrogance of self-determination immediately vanishes, is itself a form of relief and release. Responsibility for one's fate is handed over to other forces (no pun intended). A sense of emotional detachment presages that odd experience.
In the same way, these deadpan, "dull," and "tedious" love songs accept the bewildering, humbling plentitude (or pressure) of modern experience, such that cockiness looks laughable. They're balanced between an awareness that anything might happen and a sneaking suspicion that nothing probably will: any such fatalism makes flippancy look ridiculous. It's a worldview - in the case of SBPCh - that's taken from the narratives of Napoleonic battle and - by Phooey! - applied to underfunded airfields in the Ukrainian countryside, themselves now marked by unemployment. No wonder these voices sound flat and detached.
Low-tech, arguably pointless repairs on Ozerne's runway, 2011
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