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This month sees the publication of two mini-albums from St Petersburg's Sharfy. Few individuals in contemporary Russian performance embrace this degree of anonymity. Currently Sharfy offers his work via Bandcamp, where recordings are accompanied by nothing more than a couple of images. There's no text - or context of any description. Subsequent searches around other, related resources like MySpace or Soundcloud produce a handful of abstract illustrations.
The only concrete information available comes in four miniature tags used to categorize his work: "bass," "experimental," "techno," and "the city of St Petersburg." Some implicit connection is at least made between resonance and absence - between a hometown and homelessness, even.
There are elements of dubstep at play here, including a synthesized wobble bass, which emphasizes further the importance of an echo within emptiness.
One or two of the pictures used by Sharfy perhaps give us some vague hope of specificity, in other words something with which we might flesh out this artist's portrait. The picture above, for example (if we squint), offers the almost indiscernible shadow of a human figure moving quickly against a fence, which itself does nothing to delineate a bounded space.
A snowy or misty vacuum envelops everything.
It takes no great effort to imagine why such ideas and sounds might develop in St Petersburg, positioned as it is on the edge of the flat Baltic shoreline - and constantly shrouded in rain, fog, or sleet. The edges of ostensible reality often blur. And indeed the two landscape photographs used to accompany the new Bandcamp releases mark that same trajectory - from some fragile enclosure outwards into mist or across an unfocused horizon.
One of those pictures is shown below; between arm's reach and a deep field - in several senses - are the slightest of twigs. That's hardly a sturdy garrison between presence and looming self-erasure.
The titles of these instrumentals tread the same path - from specificity into vagueness: "Lights in [a] Desolate Tunnel," "Flashing Feeling," "Dead Radio," "Invisible Painting," and so forth. The last title alone operates as a useful marker of paradox: it suggests a representation of that which is not - much as Sharfy's hometown is famously (to the point of cliche) called the "most imagined city in the world." A physical location born of regal, though immaterial musings. A presence born of nothing.
Hence the wobble bass and general inclination towards silence.
Some related ideas can be heard on the streets of Yekaterinburg this week, courtesy of the young artist known as SerJah500. His identity also remains a secret, over and above his Christian name, Sergei. This noiseless stance is justified by a quote he takes from the Zen-like Russian animation series, "Ezhi and Petruchio":
On a certain level, you can get by without names altogether...
"Not all things need to be designated by their names. On a certain level, you can get by without names altogether."
Though not, it seems, without the joy of seagulls.
SerJah has just released a debut album. If Sharfy nudges human presence into the foggy, snowy emptiness of a Baltic seashore, SerJah does so in a temporal sense. His album is called "Out of Date." Before it's even published, the recording is allegedly obsolete and outrun by nothingness. In fact, according to that logic, the mere desire to establish oneself with an audible statement will evoke the surly wrath of emptiness.
And so, just as in St Petersburg, themes of absence and/or estrangement are born out in the musician's tags: "dub," "deep," "dark/experimental dubstep," "abstract hip-hop," and "d&b."
I've forgotten everything I learned...
These feelings of doom and gloom are attributable not only to location. SerJah has an account at Formspring, where a couple of telling questions have been posed. Most recently we hear: "How can I find work if I don't have any experience? I finished university two years ago, but since then have been suffering in ways that only get shi**ier. Now I've forgotten everything I learned - and have started to suffer even more."
An overriding sense of disjunction is reflected in both titular and graphic forms.
There appears, thankfully, to be a limit to this gnashing of teeth. Another question reads: "When will the end of the world take place?" His answer: "Later." At least some horrors can be postponed.
'When will the end of the world take place?' 'Later...'
Both of these musicians express their general melancholy with resonant, dub-heavy basslines. They also make passing use of dubstep, a style famously introduced to a UK audience as sounding "so empty it makes you nervous." And, perhaps, for that very reason, this introspective music is also danceable. The end of the world probably makes any dancefloor look like an appealing option.
SerJah, no more than a fleeting, unfocused presence on the streets of Yekaterinburg, ponders stepping outside into the darkness and what appears to frost-ravaged shrubbery. Time for a quick jig before the Apocalypse sets in.
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