Sleepy Town Manufacture and Cycle Hiccups: Slowly Growing Quieter

As we noted on our last visit to Sleepy Town Manufacture, the outfit was initially conceived as a trio in the city of Nizhnii Novgorod, shown above. More specifically, the original members were Anton Lukoianychev, Roman Komarov, and Aleksandr Anan'ev. Their early experiments were in the fields of dub, ambient, and even dance music but, in their own words, they would gradually move off into the sphere of "melodic idm."  

In retrospect they consider those early efforts to have "kick-started things for a number of Russian electronic outfits who were operating in various corners of the English-language web." STM became forerunners of an interest in Slavic electronica at street level, too. Concerts both around Russia and abroad were made possible as a result of their growing renown.

On the ninth anniversary of Sleepy Town Manufacture's inception, Anan'ev (below) decided to publish the project's entire back catalog online for general downloading. That sweeping, generous gesture appears now to have been followed by the beginning of a reverse process. The band's old URL currently links only to a small and select collection of materials at Bandcamp. 

Such changes are worth pondering.

This lengthy biography (in years, not words) has led to the definition of STM in some places as "the old guard of Russian idm exponents." That kind of rhetoric sounds as if it's designed to accompany an aging performer into retirement, and yet STM have, of late, been investigating the sounds and themes of evaporation and disappearance - in positive terms.

Put differently, their movement into modesty and quietness appears to be deliberate. Anan'ev, together with his colleague Stanislav Vdovin, has been developing what the two men together like to term "acid idm." Here, perhaps, we see a musical version of Timothy Leary's famous invitation to "turn on, tune in, and drop out" - with decreasing volume and increasing awe.

Similar ideas accompany the brand new release from STM and Vdovin's Unit 21, "It Comes with Nothing," the very title of which is designed to introduce the growing presence of absence. It comes with a brief text in Russian: "Try to imagine what would happen if you tried to play ambient work with the instruments used for acid-based styles. In January 2010 Sleep Town Manufacture and Unit 21 performed two live sessions, both gathering material and improvising on the fly."

Try to imagine what would happen if you tried to play ambient work with the instruments used for acid-based styles

"The musicians' mood was enhanced by a hellishly cold winter; as a result, the recording turned out to be extremely minimalist - just like some kind of chemical extract, produced in a lab of the 1960s."

Lowered eyelids capture the mood.

Unable to stay warm during that "cosmically cold" recording session, Anan'ev and Vdovin even thought about kicking a football around, mid-performance. Anything was better than standing still in front of a laptop. Sound quality took precedence over sport, however, and the two men kept on improvising.

"A few weeks later, both musicians returned to the tapes, in order to polish them and produce a finished artifact." The resulting tracks can be heard in this post, creating an impressive atmosphere that's "spooky, thoughtful, playful, and spacious." 

This synonymy of improvisation with growing humility or - by the same logic - growing expanses can also be found in the new work by Cycle Hiccups from the northern port of Petrozavodsk, shown in the penultimate image below. This project, as with STM, is fundamentally a one-man operation, in this case Aleksandr Velikosel'skii (below). He specializes in what he terms "improvisational collages, based on instrumental loops and vocal phrases."

He recently took part in the wonderful "Whale Kit" project that was designed to shed light upon the life and plight of beluga whales in Russia's arctic waters. A kinship with lonely mammals seemed best captured with an ad-libbed form of expression, in which constantly unravelling potentials were much greater than any limited - and therefore limiting - plans.

Improvised movement always takes you further from a starting point; your initial "home" become increasingly distant with each step or gesture.

Cycle Hiccups' new and frequently beautiful work from Scandinavia can already be watched online. As for sounds, pure and simple, he is busy with a young project entitled Peresheek. Consisting of nothing more than a single page and two joined photographs of isolated figures (below), it frames a long, haunting audio recording that promises much for the future. 

The only words we hear from Peresheek thus far are: "We exist in different landscapes and spaces... Our own spaces are the forests - and on this recording we brought them together, both geographically and musically." Through improvised work with Sergey Dmitriev (aka Bedroom Bear), the two men evoke a space much greater than themselves - and the pleasant prospect of vanishing therein: "We would like to share with you the spirit of our forests and their quiet charm."

We would like to share with you the spirit of our forests and their quiet charm