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Vladimir Dudkin (Moscow)
Not that long ago, we touched upon the work of sound artist Vladimir Dudkin who also performs under the stage names Microprocessor and neuroSampler. As those monikers suggest, the emphasis here will be upon a deconstructive process, specifically in the context of grandeur. The resident of a major city, Dudkin focuses upon the smaller, often fractured shapes of various “breakdowns.” Living in an international center of finance, politics, and construction, he invests his time and energy in scribing centrifugal trajectories – away from pomp and circumstance. His newest recordings draw those lines very far indeed.
Attention is focused upon the promise of escape.
Dudkin has just published a six-track, 24-minute glitch EP entitled "Moonscan." It's dedicated to the search for new forms – either of life or landscape - across a blank and dusty canvas. Little patterns are discerned among the blips, squeaks, and scratches of instrument readings. Miniature harmonies are investigated in the middle of nowhere, so to speak.
This same interplay between perceived new harmonies and standard, earthbound experience is just as evident
in Dudkin's graphic work, which adorns some of his social network profiles. Manmade, geological, and animal forms are placed together in ways that imply natural, yet long-forgotten relationships between them. And conversely, some of his paintings dedicated to the most “stable” or banal of urban environments insert discord into daily habit. Where we expect constancy, we find imbalance - and vice versa. Routine and surprise change places in small and unsettling ways. Modernity and meaning, it seems, have a very inconsistent affiliation.
There are certainly good reasons why one of his paintings, depicting a standard mid-century armchair from a split or fractured viewpoint, is dedicated to David Lynch. As the director himself has said, in celebration of skewed views: “Absurdity is what I like most in life.” That observation should then be placed beside Lynch’s conviction, voiced elsewhere, that: “We're all like detectives in life.” Concerted effort is invested in places that produce illogical answers – at best.
And so moonscapes appeal to our musicians in that they offer distant, though unsullied hopes of novel, maybe consoling discovery. If the world is mere disjunction or disorder, maybe “somewhere else” will produce more satisfying solutions.
Tobias Faar (Kaunas, Lithuania)
It’s useful to compare that outlook to the work of Lithuanian drone and glitch composer, Tobias Faar, whose real name is Žydrūnas Mačiulis. He refers to his own experiments as “sound catching.” Transitory, vague significances may reside in unusual sonic patterns that begin or develop elsewhere. They need to investigated - amid Lynch’s ubiquitous “absurdity” - and brought to order.
Just as Dudkin, so Mačiulis hopes that natural (pre-modern, pre-linguistic) experience might reflect the structure of a grander cosmology, which we’ve either forgotten or simply ignored over time. “When you feel sounds floating through your veins… then you start imagining how things could be.” In the relationship between sound and his own body, on a purely instinctive level, he starts to ponder the configuration of grander, more isolated realms. At a few steps’ remove from wordy, vacuous experience are the sonic shapes and forms that speak of distant harmonies.
When you feel sounds floating through your veins… then you start imagining how things could be...
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 are some half-remembered truths: they are more intuitive than overtly intellectual.
Somewhere within subjectivity is a system.
Hence the focus upon what Mačiulis calls “abstract, minimal” sound patterns, often investigated in his real-time improvisations and/or wanton invocation of “accidents.” His repeated recourse to field recordings is conducted in the same spirit: the glitchy chatter of nature might reveal abstract, miniature, and irrational configurations that are usually hidden by grey logic. Just as Dudkin, he drags equally normal or everyday objects into this accidental “sound catching”: cups, plates, and glass vases are among the tools he uses to discover more about the magic of flukes and fortuitousness.
Welcome to the world of the unconsciousness, phantoms, and the endless garden of the mind
Sometimes, though, mere acoustic queries are not enough. In order to ponder a quieter, older, and superior alternative to modern society, one perhaps needs to leave it altogether. And that brings us a to a new drone EP from the RusZud label, showcasing the work of several young performers – with a common focus upon things elegiac: “Welcome to the world of the unconsciousness, phantoms, and the endless garden of the mind.”
Those magical places are only accessible, it seems, if one quits the here and now. One of the artists involved in this 26-minute project recently wrote online: “I’ve left society in order to change my worldview to something more esoteric. That suits me much better…”
More specifically, this voice belongs to the artist known as Ownsi Lense (or, as he’s called in other places, Ilia Shizz Shengeliya). His drone textures are, in his own words, woven in order to consider both the cause and consequence of “personal collapse,” which at least offers an escape “from under the ice of our world’s ignorance and deception.” Elsewhere we find claims 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 this man ever gets from society is pressure, moral debasement, and hatred… He avoids it all with his own reality – that of music.”
Human society offers nothing more than intrigue and death
Lense’s hometown is Kubinka, maybe forty miles from Moscow. Although it has a rich mercantile history dating back to the fifteenth century, recent decades have transformed local green fields into a military firing range for tanks. The pressure upon residents is palpable – in booming sonic forms.
One of the other contributors to the RusZud EP goes by the name of Ego Ex Nihil, a moniker that once more leads us to anticipate the creation of abstract “nano-truths” and the search for purpose from far beyond society’s pompous, noisy operations. Some investigation online reveals that this artist also goes by the name of Andres Westrvm. His own soundscapes hope to evoke “the depths of the cosmos, through which we travel by way of invisible, mythical planets."
Kubinka, Moscow Region
Here, too, physical location appears to play something of a role, in that Mr. Westrvm is a resident of Sukhoi Log (“Dry Gully”), a small and virtually anonymous town not very far from Yekaterinburg. Itself born of eighteenth-century villages and churches, Sukhoi Log would also become home to Soviet military planning, specifically through the transfer of infantry battalions to its once quiet streets.
Due, it seems, to the social metamorphoses undergone by these isolated places, their musical residents sense that modernity’s noisy, even bellicose intrusions are inevitable. Escaping the patterns and prejudices of gross “normality” is very difficult. We see in these monotonal tracks a belief that only the moon(!) might offer a chance to scribe small, yet encouraging patterns of significance. After all, the other musician involved in the RusZud EP, Uior, has long been known to us in a related endeavor (AAGSF) that - for years - has used sad drone instrumentals to mourn the loss of the Soviet space program. Escape from the Earth’s dead weight frequently seems impossible for these young men, whose compositions are, en masse, titled specifically as “Elegy.”
The best is behind us.
These works will not bring comfort
And even if some superior worldview might be fashioned in happy, quiet isolation from modern infantry, industry, or tanks, we have the words of Ownsi Lense to consider. “These works will not bring comfort. Instead they add new, oppressive shades to an overall picture of nomadic existence and desperation.”
Maybe the moon isn’t far enough.
Sukhoi Log (near Yekaterinburg)
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