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Artwork for Speck (Nikita Bondarev, Novosibirsk): "You [Are] Still Alone" (2011)
Today we examine a couple of musicians from Siberia - and a couple more from Lithuania. Despite their distances, both geographically and linguistically, these artists share a common attitude towards the evocative potential of their soundscapes. Much can be pondered with sound alone. We start in Novosibirsk and a new release from Speck, aka Nikita Bondarev. A four-track, seventeen-minute EP has appeared thanks to the efforts of Krasnodar netlabel FUSElab.
Entitled "You [Are] Still Alone," this publication blends ambient and drone layers with almost sparkling distortion, as if the places conjured by these gentle sounds - in which we're allegedly alone - are somehow "excessive." In realms where evident horizons become blurred or distances vague, logical and/or physical trajectories will seem frustratingly pointless. That loss of effable clarity takes audible shape. Disappointment and disorientation become distortion.
Sonic textures straight from the Siberian taiga
FUSElab endorse these abstract sounds and imagined places with great enthusiasm: "We're glad to present you with a masterpiece from Speck. Nikita has sent us some really deep, even profound and touching sonic textures straight from the Siberian taiga." The world's largest biome stands in for somewhere even greater - in the middle of which "we are all" supposedly destined to experience solitude, even isolation.
One of the landscapes celebrated by Speck
That sensation is further sketched for us by FUSElab: "Can you imagine becoming a tiny dot... in the middle of a huge, leveled landscape?" And yet the very same, patently unnerving experience is offered to us as a "sweet dream." The loss of direction or confident progression is touted as something both rare and appealing.
Can you imagine becoming a tiny dot..?
In the same spirit, Bondarev's current avatar on a Russian social network is nothing more than a white paint splash on a pitch-black background: it's a statement of presence, yet devoid of form, extension, or manifest meaning. It is a chance blot "in the middle of nowhere." Likewise, his uploaded photo albums contain no self-portraits, just a (very) large number of northern landscapes, many of them seemingly in Scandinavia and Iceland.
Our second Siberian musician is well known to Bondarev, since he has left friendly comments beneath some of those same images. This genial colleague is Ilya Ferreyn, shown below and who publishes his own work under the related moniker of Ferrein. He has just published a 29-minute recording, "Tomorrow," through Germany's Warminal Records. Together those eight tracks are designed to create "a story - both of the artist's emotional investment in this music and of how the melodies or sounds came into being." As we'll see, metaphors of passage and escape will again develop.
In a biographical sense, Ferrein's own sounds began with "an old Soviet piano" at music school, but he would later discover the joys of lo-fi Chinese equipment and related experimentation. In fact the initial sounds gathered for "Tomorrow" were recorded on an equally inelegant dictaphone. Many of them are taken from the most mundane yet typical quarters of Siberian life, as Ferrein himself explains. They are the sounds - for example of yard sweepers - that help to give a sense of place or time. Ferrein associates that particular sweeping sound with early mornings before school, many years ago.
Music is the creation of a private space
Speaking directly to the creation of some lyrical "grounding" in an otherwise meaningless expanse, Ferrein recently admitted to the Russian webzine MusicSerf: "I really don't want music to become my career. For me, music is the creation of a private space - one where I don't owe anybody anything." He views the outside social world as a threatening environment, amid which music creates a sense of safety and (small) liberty. Nikita Bondarev, however, looks beyond the city to the more promising and forested realms of nature, where anonymity in an endless ecosphere offers both membership and a radical flight from threat.
Some "deep ends" look more appealing than others.
Now we turn to Lithuania and the simultaneous publication of ambient or dub works from the towns of Kaunas and Vilnius. The former address is home to Sraunus, whose work we previously investigated in the context of a compilation from local label Night Music. His newest sound recordings come to us by way of the UK, specifically via Brighton's micro-label Blik Muzik, which is overseen by Lithuanian compatriot Audrius Vaitiekunas, aka IJO. Either Mr. Vaitiekunas or his colleagues at Blik have come out on the label's website in eager support of the new Sraunus publication, "Blogas" (the PR materials are written in the first person by a Blik employee).
Minimalist drum patterns
More specifically, listeners are invited by Blik to focus upon "minimalist drum patterns and emotional synths." Admirers at Soundcloud have added several spatial metaphors to mirror that emotional "expansiveness": they speak, for example, of some "watery," oceanic realm or a "sonic space" that - as noted with Speck - falls occasionally into distortion. Nonetheless, any audible experience of descent or loss is praised as a "fantastic voyage," just as the recording's artwork - shown below and made by the musician himself - positions the passage of birds against (absolutely) nothing.
It depicts a specific "voyage" through non-specificity, perhaps. The rippled background makes it hard for us to determine our own point of view, i.e., to discern whether we're looking at clouds or the surface of water. Stable coordinates have revolved ninety degrees.
Artwork for "Blogas" by Sraunus (Vilnius, Lithuania 2011)
In that respect, it's important to note that one of the Sraunus compositions - "Haga" - samples a speech by Vladimir Lenin, itself recorded in 1919. Translated into English, the text begins: "What is Soviet power? What is the essence of this new power, which people in most countries still will not, or cannot, understand? The nature of this power, which is attracting larger and larger numbers of workers in every country, is the following: in the past the country was, in one way or another, governed by the rich, or by the capitalists, but now, for the first time, the country is being governed by the classes, and moreover, by the masses of those classes, which capitalism formerly oppressed." That same social journey would map a related, increasingly negative path into empty, if not abyssal territory.
As these sounds - and their makers - consider the imprecise, perhaps risky appeal of nothingness, we turn to the second Lithuanian artist, Tobias Faar, whose real name is Žydrūnas Mačiulis. As we remarked a couple of months ago, he usually refers to his own experiments as “sound catching.” In other words, transitory, vague significances may reside in unusual sonic patterns that either begin or develop elsewhere; they need to investigated and brought to order. Activity is discerned in unusual, distant, and often formless locations.
Our composer adopts a suitably anonymous and "sonocentric" pose (which is apparent cause for celebration). Long live nothing in particular.
Tobias Faar (aka Žydrūnas Mačiulis, Kaunas Lithuania)
Tobias Faar views the romance of open, "empty" places (be they physical, cosmic, or simply imagined) in terms of virgin territory where plans can be tried anew. An empty domain allows for thoughts of potential, correction, and renewal: “When you feel sounds floating through your veins [and interrupting silence]… then you start imagining how things could be.” In this relationship between sound and his own body, on a purely instinctive level, Mačiulis begins to ponder the configuration of grander, even more isolated realms. Maybe wider, deeper vistas offer grander hopes. At a few steps’ remove from wordy, vacuous experience are the sonic shapes and forms that speak of distant harmonies. Little sounds perhaps offer some connection to "cosmic" possibilities. In between them lies nothing.
Research into human emotion through simple sound structures
Elsewhere this link between corporeal and universal experience (between physical “neurosampling” and grander verities) is called “psychological research into human emotion through simple sound structures.” Somewhere in the smallest aspects of private, affective experience - and the sounds associated with them - are some half-remembered, maybe timeless truths: they are more intuitive than intellectual.
These ideas are now extended through a release entitled "Autumn Gardens," which begins with a tiny, yet emotionally loaded sound that's taken from nowhere, so to speak. More than four minutes of recorded raindrops preface a drone composition, "Cold Tears of [the] Sky." Emptiness begins to emote, initially through the cleansing clarity of a rainstorm and then by morphing slowly into considerable distortion and choral overtones. Tiny sounds are recorded against a natural expanse: they simultaneously evoke both a frustratingly elusive potential and some "choral," endlessly networked harmony. They symbolize both nothing and (possibly!) everything.
Freedom and melancholy therefore overlap - as liberty and loss.
Tobias Faar live, 2011
These four composers, using sonic, visual, and textual tools, all ponder aspects of "emptiness" and the benefits of moving (swiftly!) in its direction. Ferrein speaks of his music as the creation of safety in the middle of some social vacuum; Speck (Nikita Bondarev) romanticizes the natural equivalent of "networked existence," preferring Siberian flora and fauna to people. And yet, if we follow the concerns of Sraunus, then collective, massed, and/or civic passage into the nothingness of "revolutionary freedom" has a very bad precedent in neighboring lands. What we're dealing with are private concerns, not public agendas.
Žydrūnas Mačiulis - aka Tobias Faar - ponders, as we say, the promise of under-investigated spaces and open territories, since they both embody potential. They offer an audiovisual sense of room in which mistakes can be fixed - and failed plans reconsidered. For both these Lithuanian and Russian artists, however, the idea of very grand potential - when actualized - does not have a good track record. Individuals may celebrate the riskiness of wandering intuitively, perhaps even irresponsibly(!) into unknown territory: nobody here, though, is suggesting that society should follow in their footsteps. The sampled Lenin speech is warning enough.
Nature and its networks offer more civic promise than ideology; they also, however, require an erasure of proud "self-realization" in terms of goal-driven enterprise. The flattering goals of politics are juxtaposed with the humbling workings of nature in these recordings; togethr they produce an overall tone of bittersweet possibility. Talk of politics involves haughty metaphors of "victory" (as we hear from 1919); nature, however, involves a vanishing act, into the arctic seas, skies, and endless Siberian forest to which these instrumentals endlessly refer.
We need only consider the imagery chosen by Sraunus below: it shows us windblown seedpods, ready to take flight and realize their own potential through a process of loss, flight from home, and radical - yet necessary - isolation.
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