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The launch of our new site is marked with the release of a free compilation album; it is available at Bandcamp. Today we showcase the first half of the running order.
A word of (re)introduction. “Far from Moscow” is a project designed to aggregate and foster music over a very wide area. We've now decided to add another facet to our endeavors and release regular compilations of generically specific material; these digital publications should help to slow the rate at which young and impressive artists move across the horizon. The same albums should also help to nurture new audiences, both at home and… far from Moscow.
One might assume that a certain knee-jerk maximalism has haunted Slavic or Baltic music in recent years. Released, with little warning, into the international arena, musicians from Eastern Europe might be inspired to chase as many new styles as possible. Perhaps panic and/or pomp would result. Our first compilation is designed to counter that faulty assumption. Where one might expect to find gaudy excess, we instead offer fourteen champions of elegance and confident restraint.
The first collection of new music comes, in other words, from the minimal end of the spectrum, with a leaning towards techno and related forms of understatement, if not severity.
All of the artists here have been celebrated before on our website. In the name of objectivity, we’ve arranged them in alphabetical order at Bandcamp. We hope that readers will use our resources and related links to discover more about the people on display. Everybody involved will be very glad to hear your words of encouragement from far away.
First, therefore, and representing the letter “a” is Alla Farmer from the southern city of Samara, on the banks of the river Volga. She plays not only as a solo artist, but has also worked with (the recently defunct) Bajinda behind the Enemy Lines – a large, almost formless and generically free alliance of southern artists. This commitment to sound over canonical styles is something to which she has adhered since childhood. “Alla was always fascinated by everything to do with knocks, shouts, mumbles, jangles, groans, and any related noises…”
Knocks, shouts, mumbles, jangles, groans, and related noises
That happy amorphousness and freedom finds spatial expression in the track she contributes, “Oblaka” (tr: “Clouds”).
Next in line is Bip Soup, aka Moscow’s Petr Serkin, who often performs under the moniker of Combinator. Some of his recent work has appeared via the excellent Siberian label Electronica, but Bip Soup has been also attracting extra attention in the UK, Germany, and other nations with better weather. This centrifugal movement is not always freely chosen, though; artists such as Serkin need to venture further afield in a world where hard media (and music stores) mean less and less. Travel away from home, be it digital or physical, is unavoidable.
Serkin, in fact, spends much of his time writing and marketing audio samples to be used by equally far-flung tech- and house performers. In a recent interview with FFM, he said that the financial success of those samples now outpaces that of his music. He attributes that odd state of affairs to a certain fussiness among Russian artists. Put differently, in a noisy world - ravaged by piracy (and low- bitrate mp3s) - a healthy elitism seems to endure. Once again, any “shouts, mumbles, and jangling sounds” should be unique.
Creativity should not fall to panic (even if a few bad habits emerge under market pressures).
The figure of Clapan (Denis Korsunskii) returns us to the south, specifically to the city of Krasnodar. Although he has lived in the general area his entire life, Clapan’s parents initially moved between a fair number of towns, leading a young schoolboy to seek permanence or stability in sound:
He began to amaze his elders even in kindergarten...
"He began to amaze his elders even in kindergarten, when they'd ask him tо perform all manner of songs. Grown-ups would play a live musical accompaniment, while Denis would use his voice to imitate any instrument at all. He would do this on request." Well-organized sounds took the place of fleeting, irregular addresses.
As with Petr Serkin, Clapan also combines his creative work with engineering skills in order to provide a regular income. More specifically, he builds PC-based virtual instruments and, simultaneously, runs the Spektral Audio School for future generations. In short, a pedagogical intent has become an established aspect of his career. Having inherited a culture of DIY wizardry from his father and grandfather, both electrical engineers in the USSR, he now hopes to leave the younger generation with an equal skill-set.
Rules and regulations have their place - and they needn't be bent.
Returning to Moscow once more and to the letter “d,” we find Dop’Q (Misha Dop). Like his workmates here, he also operates within a broad range of styles, despite his current reputation as a techno artist. Dop admits to having experimented in past years with "jungle, idm, experimental, electro, techhouse, deep," and - finally! - techno, especially in restrained forms.
Perhaps because of time's passage and the frequent need for DJs to brand themselves as representatives of a fairly small stylistic breadth, Dop is happy to lapse occasionally into an old-school, carefree eclecticism. In his own words, that kind of retrospective activity takes the form of a "naive and nostalgic techno-sound," framed with elements of "a constantly changing" palette. Any vagueness in that final phrase is lessened once we know that Dop's labors now extend beyond music alone: he is also involved with aspects of painting and - even further afield - the design business as a whole.
A naive and nostalgic techno-sound
One of the boldest extensions of artistry we've encountered - far beyond design work! - was in a dance compilation of 2009: "Salat, Moscow!" The disc's title was presumably a play upon the French greeting 'Salut!' and therefore an invitation to shared festivities. It came together with a unique addition: a small recipe book. Each contributor provided both music and a recipe; one of those kitchen-based outfits was Easy Changes, a duo operating between Moscow and Berlin - with occasional forays to both Italy and Ibiza. Whenever resorting to the English language for PR purposes, these two techno DJs have tended to refer to themselves as Denis Cast and Kirill Sil.
Since that CD, both Cast and Sil have continued to produce high-end deep techno. Currently they make use of a promotional text that sounds a little strange in English, but after some quick editorial alterations, we have: "Easy Changes, who made lots of noise with back-to-back releases on [Philadelphia's] Foundsound Records, are working to develop a unique synthesis of rhythmic patterns, an entire world of mysterious sounds, and subconscious emotional flows. Easy Changes create music that's full of suspense; it's catching the attention of techno fans worldwide."
Not being in a position to argue with those grand claims, we move on. Various vague and sweeping statements follow, ending with the domestic - and more quantifiable - assertion that Easy Changes "play a major role in Russia's underground techno scene. They're also the foundation of [the capital's dance project,] Nervmusic. This is Moscow's first minimal techno label to produce really exciting music - the kind of tracks that come 'from Russia with love.'"
...the kind of tracks that come 'from Russia with love'
As we might expect amid examples of minimalism, though, some of the artists we’ve chosen here are much less evident in social, promotional, or pedagogical spheres. In other words, minimalism starts taking on geographic or spatial forms; little sounds come from tiny locations.
Arguably the quietest of all the performers in our compilation is Moscow’s Frunk29 (Marat Shainskii). Difficult to find on most social networks, he prefers to operate in silence, it seems. Linked, as with Combinator, to the Electronica label, Shainskii’s works need to be sought in dimly lit corners of the web. Any effort in unearthing those sounds will be well rewarded.
From the least known contributor, we then swivel towards the most famous. Ilya Lagutenko is frontman of Mumiy Troll, arguably Russia’s most celebrated rock outfit since the mid-1990s. He spends an increasing (and admirable) amount of time with younger ensembles - on this occasion with the duo from St Petersburg known as Mars Needs Lovers (Ivan Startsev and Sergei Kuznetsov).
The resulting track on display here (as a remix by Cable Toy) comes from a collection of fifteen related versions of Mars Needs Lovers' 2011 single “Alps, Palms.” Behind that apparently shambolic inclusiveness there nonetheless operates a fixed principle: “The people involved are either our close friends or those folks whom we want to know better. The kind of people with whom we’ve wanted to work, too."
Minimal sounds are those of small, methodical attachments. Restrained noises speak of a social wariness. And so, in that same spirit of tentative willingness - or slow, studied movement into the world - it makes sense, perhaps, to end this first outing where we began. In the south - as a safe return home.
Ilya Lagutenko (center) and Mars Needs Lovers
We move, therefore, back to Krasnodar, specifically to a young performer known as Ishome (or, more correctly, Mira Iskhome). She introduces herself in a rather unique way. She frames her music with some famous lines from a Russian story for very young readers: "Little children! Don't go walking in Africa! In Africa there are sharks, gorillas, big snakes, and crocodiles, too. They'll bite, punch, and generally offend you. Don't go walking in Africa, kids! In Africa there are robbers, villains, and the awful pirate Barmalei. He runs around Africa eating children... That nasty, evil, greedy Barmalei."
And so these minimal, restrained, and somewhat wary instrumentals move slowly into the busier, social world of “knocks, shouts, mumbles, jangling, groans, and related noises…” Caused by bestial, often disrespectful or dangerous behavior.
Tomorrow we offer more of the same. Keep your eyes open - just in case.
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