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Tim Ballista (right, Moscow)
The Moscow-based electronic netlabel RusZUD has just published a small collection of drone tracks entitled "Elegy 3: Paranormal Phenomena." It includes the work of various artists showcased on this site before, for example Atarix, Tim Ballista, and Ownsi Lense. The album's artwork is nothing more than a pure black square, a respectful nod towards Malevich's world-famous statement of how art might operate without external, ostensible reality. Nonetheless, there's much in these recordings that makes them part and parcel of their surroundings. Put differently, the role of Russia itself - especially its physical geography - is an enduring and important context.
Tim Ballista, for example, is already known to this site as an impressive exponent of contemporary glitch. His aesthetic was recently summarized in dramatic form by his sometime label - Illphabetik. More specifically, his instrumentals were called investigations into various "dark atmospheres and related sound design. Ballista tells stories about form[al change] and spatiotemporal journeys. He describes all that he sees with both speed and [manifest] volume." Here that trademark glitch-core has rapidly decelerated, but the motifs of passage continue. Into the distance...
Dark atmospheres and related sound design
In other words, the object of his sonically evoked travel is on this particular occasion is extremely far away. Ballista's contribution to "Elegy 3" is called "Gliese 581c." His seemingly obscure title actually has a very specific referent: it is the name of a planet roughly twenty light years from our own, famous in scientific circles for its atmospheric resemblance to Earth.
Atarix (Sergei Khaninev, Moscow)
Already we sense that the staff at RusZUD are spinning tales of the "paranormal" in regard to places distant, yet nonetheless real. Distance and strangeness interweave. On the edge of human experience lie unfamiliar phenomena, as obscure - one might say - as the pitch-black artwork chosen for "Elegy 3." The double entendre inherent in the noun "obscurity" serves us well. After all, earlier recordings from Ballista himself have certainly pondered "a world full of unseen creatures - and unknown forces."
His Moscow colleague Sergei Khaninev, shown above, contributes to these evocative textures. Khaninev established the TruTypeSounds label and currently performs live under the guise of Atarix. Over and above his managerial responsibilities in web-based projects, he is also able to list his interests as "musician, sound-designer, and mixing/mastering engineer."
Raised in the emigre communities of New Zealand and Canada, Mr. Khaninev slowly moved away from hardcore and hip-hop towards the dark ambient expressions we find here. His new composition, "Clean Streets" is audibly similar to Ballista's drone, but references a place that's considerably closer to home. Obscurity grows nearer: blackness is closer at hand.
A world full of unseen creatures - and unknown forces
Just outside the Russian capital, in the town of Kubinka, lives another of the RusZUD artists, known professionally as Ownsi Lense (or, as he’s sometimes called, Ilia Shizz Shengeliya). In Lense's online materials, we find that paranormal phenomena are neither attributed to distant planets nor to neighboring streets; they've become part of one's habitus. Things uncanny are right here.
On a prior occasion we came across the statement that Lense “doesn’t [even] consider himself a human being. He sees no similarity between himself and other people… in fact he tries only to avoid them. Human society offers nothing more than intrigue and death. All that man ever gets from society is pressure, moral debasement, and hatred… Lense avoids it all with his own reality – that of music.”
Should flight be hard to engineer, then the Russian landscape clearly offers many opportunities for hiding oneself - in places where snow-blown solitude recalls life on Gliese 581c... Ownsi Lense dedicates his own drone track to some "Dark Wood Spirit," so what sounds have come from those somber, distant quarters of Russia recently? We might turn to Omsk, approximately nine hundred miles from Moscow and home to the excellent Dopefish label. Two new recordings have appeared in the last few days, from Silver Boy and Milky Toad (collaborating with St. Petersburg's Galya Chikiss).
Human society offers nothing more than intrigue and death
Silver Boy's new work - "Voyeur" - expresses similar doubts to Lense, in that our Omsk artist makes use of old-school mass media to comment upon its audience. Mediated forms of expression from the 1980s, no matter their warm tones or fondness for sunny climes, now sound jaded and even on the verge of collapse. In other words, we're offered the fuzzy sounds of VHS tapes, exhausted cassettes, and other indicators of fading dreams giving way to physical demise. A few days ago on Vkontakte Silver Boy announced: "It turns out you can find really great music on porn sites!" He had discovered the soundtrack to an awkward marriage of private desire and mass consumption. Fenced off from Siberia's "dark wood spirits," mainstream culture offers an enticing, though no less ominous alternative.
Galya Chikiss (St. Petersburg)
For that reason we noted before that this young man has dedicated much of his catalog to themes of physical yearning, sex, and prostitution. Amid a a host of soundbites - from adventure films, porn, TV family shows, and advertising - we find the soundtrack to doubt, i.e., to cynical media and the inability of romance to exist therein. Urban culture turns desire into anxiety.
Once again, the world outside must surely offer something better! Yet Omsk in winter is unlikely to trump an indoor box full of VHS tapes in mid-January. All the same, the romance of somewhere far away from tawdry, cynical enterprise persists - even if those imagined, isolated places currently boast a temperature of minus 30 Celsius. In that light, one of Silver Boy's label-mates at Dopefish has announced a simultaneous publication, the title of which translates as "Winter Dream." It comes from Andrei Mitroshin, aka Milky Toad, working on this occasion with Chikiss, as mentioned.
The opening track starts with the freezing rush of a Siberian wind, followed by Mitroshin's trademark retro-organ, and it then becomes 96 seconds in praise of some northern "radiance" (siyanie) glowing across the sky...
In essence, I maintain a distance from society
An interview with Mitroshin sets the scene nicely. A Russian webzine asked several days ago whether he's able to make money from his music. Might he turn his craft into a business? Mitroshin answered that some neighbors had just paid him for a little DIY computer design and that he had earned roughly $3 for helping to push somebody's car out of the snow. "In essence, I maintain a distance from society." A more reliable income is actually available in IT, through his day job at the Omsk State University.
Andrei Mitroshin (Milky Toad, Omsk)
Asking then how he escapes this kind of drudgery, the magazine gets a semi-serious response. Much effort and fantasy, it seems, is needed to flee the daily grind. "I tend to compose with a laptop in one hand and bread in the other. I put on a hockey helmet and some stockings. Everything gets wired up and plugged in; then I start composing. Often I'll wear a red evening gown - or a buffalo hide." The interview ends on a slightly more serious - and pithy - note. Mitroshin is asked the best place for Milky Toad's music. He answers with a single noun: "The forest."
Sometimes I'll compose in red evening gown - or a buffalo hide
And so these young artists, both in Moscow and Omsk, ponder the unnerving challenge of other, unknown, and sometimes worrying locations. Slowly the presumed whereabouts of unique or "paranormal" experiences moves from distant planets to neighboring streets, and then - as we see - the forests of Omsk that lie right outside one's door. Such is the disconcerting magic of the Russian landscape, able to generate the imagery of fairytales and an "elegiac" pitch-black nothingness simultaneously.
Everywhere and nowhere become synonymous, as these musicians struggle with the meaning of spaces so large they symbolize both virgin territory and an indistinct wilderness. Whatever that duality, the allure of some "winter dream" endures, offering an alternative to the world of cash, pornography, and primetime banality. Everybody runs for the hills.
Milky Toad and Chikiss: "Winter Dream" (2012)
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