|
The moniker Zapaska hides the identities of two performers, one female (Iana Shpachinskaia) and the other male (Pavel Nechitailo). Folks living in Ukraine, especially residents of Kiev, might then recognize those names as part of two other, older projects. Shpachinskaia fronts the band CheChe and Nechitailo is a member of Propala Gramota. This background is useful in that our two artists, when brought together, have relatively little to say for themselves.
Their musical style is sparse, lo-fi, and yet deliberately inclusive of the outside world - in terms of hiss, squeaks, and various bumps that remain in the recordings. Both musicians have substantial professional experience behind them, so why resort to these miniature noises? Nechitailo made some interesting observations to the Ukrainian press recently that shed light on the situation.
Following a few words to his interviewer about the raison d'etre of Zapaska, he then paused and said: "Music is a religion. It mustn't be sold. If you consider yourself any kind of 'alternative' musician, you shouldn't gather crowds - or do any PR work, even."
If you consider yourself any kind of 'alternative' musician you shouldn't gather crowds - or do any PR work, even...
"If you do, then your band won't be any different to a heavily advertised brand of toothpaste." The musicians' view of material bonds extend to other spheres, too.
An avoidance of excessively clean, studio-polished - and therefore artificial - sound is effected by keeping all manner of mistakes and ambient crackling on the soundtrack. Using that technique, these songs make claim to a better - and more local - significance. They're no longer reflections of ubiquitous commerce; they capture a specific place and time. What, therefore, does Nechitailo think of his local surroundings, usually hidden by a layer of glossy ads?
"Ukraine's a country of cataclysmic events and enormous pain. Most of the events we celebrate are sad events." He then lists some of the nation's most tragic moments throughout the centuries. "Even our recent Orange Revolution - that didn't work, either. It's as if there are special pylons everywhere, giving off radio waves that herd people together... with misery."
It's as if there are special pylons everywhere, giving off radio waves that herd people together... with misery
He sums up the DNA of a typical Ukrainain folk song:
"A Cossack's dying somewhere - and a girl will be crying, too. In a word, everything's awful. And since I'm a native son of these lands, I sing sad songs, too."
The air of homelessness that haunts international, corporate pop music is removed, and underneath we hear the limping sounds of minor, yet honest effort in dejected surroundings. Thus a new folk music comes into being, based on rough improvisation and various tape-loops... made directly on stage. The result is forlorn - but extraordinarily poignant, too.
It's useful to compare the outlook of Zapaska to some Belarusian neighbors, namely Silver Wedding (Serebrianaia Svad'ba) from Minsk. We've written of the band before, but they now have a debut album, called "Muscles of the Heart" (Serdechnaia Muskulatura). And so we come back for more.
Like Zapaska, Silver Wedding also draw upon spontaneous folk or street performance, yet here the browbeaten honesty of Nechitailo is much more stylized. Silver Wedding give us a fully staged world of clowns, jesters, and jugglers - all together filling the stage with dramatized ditties. The heroes of Silver Wedding's songs come to life before us. In the words of the Zvuki.Ru project, viewers should - as a result of these rambling, sometimes confrontational shows - be "amazed, enthralled, and enamored, too."
Speaking to vocalist Svetlana Ben' recently, journalists were told how much the band needs to interact with that audience. Zapaska doubt the commercial workings of performance art - and Silver Wedding dramatize artists' lamentable fates even when some kind of income is available. What, however, they both foreground is the need of their imagined heroes for human contact.
What links our artists in Kiev and Minsk is the belief that songwriting, come what may, is always a form of potential - and therefore priceless - contact with some absent 'other.' For Zapaska it's a spiritual figure; for Ben' and her musicians, it's the parterre. In both cases, a full sense of union and/or belonging is rare.
Hence the disconsolate tone.
For Ben' that same social yearning, in fact, goes beyond local streets and parks. Much of the ensemble's aesthetic is based upon a considerable love for all things French - colored by an awareness of frustrating distances. "I have this crazy affection for France," says Ben'. "I first wrote songs to be performed with an accordion. I'd take all kinds of words from a Russian-French phrasebook! It really helped to fill that sense of a void in my life. A void caused by the absence of any 'Frenchness'! And so I wrote songs from the point of view of some provincial girl who dreamed of seeing France."
Real life frustrated her fantasy. Ben' says that she couldn't afford a French trip herself for years. And then, all of a sudden, the band was invited to Paris! She thinks her wishing may have turned a desire into reality: "Seems to me, our songs make magic happen! That's why I've been afraid to sing anything about death..."
Seems to me, our songs make magic happen! That's why I've been afraid to sing anything about death...
Ben' also has a deep-seated love for puppet theater, an art she considers both "sacred and profound." She sees a certain social verity in silent, wobbling figures made from low-grade materials. Inanimate objects are first made mobile, given social contact, and then... something scared happens.
Once again, an overlap is possible between our tunes from Ukraine and Belarus.
The new album reflects this worldview. The opening and closing tracks are instrumentals, named after the heart's left and right ventricles. The band's live shows have likewise included a fundamentally medical diagram of the heart behind the music (below). Somewhere on stage, perhaps, is the chance to turn a materialist view of the heart into a romantic one. The onstage image, in fact, already shows signs of life.
Ben' certainly believes - come what may! - that hope and dreams can lessen quotidian sadness; she has just written some songs about a home and a little theater of her own. Maybe they'll come true, just like the French journey.
Her gesture below suggests a prayer of hope.
Also mixing music and theater - if we return briefly to Ukraine - are the band known as Orkestr Che; they, similarly, have been covered on FFM in the recent past. The artists have just released a new mini-album, whose incredibly long, nonsensical title might translate into English as "The Robots Wear Hydro-Tubes with Great Ceremony." It has been made available for free download.
When we last wrote of the orchestra, we pointed out that their recourse to theatrical tradition comes from a desire to create an inclusive environment, such that artists and audience all feel as one. It's a social goal that grows from a lack of faith in the outside, often heartless world.
Speaking recently to the press in their home town of Kharkov, the group answered some questions that sit well in the context of what we've heard from Zapaska and Silver Wedding. A journalist wanted to know the musicians' view of their civic surroundings, in fact of their nation as a whole.
When asked "what exactly is Ukraine?" they answered: "It's a UFO," which apparently stands for Unencumbered Fatigued Organism - a limp entity embodied in some recent stage shows.
Amidst all these otherworldly, mystical forces, is there a more reliable, spiritual realm to which we might turn? "There's already a virtual religion in Ukraine; it's made of the numbers you see printed on greenbacks." The alternative to that fiscal misery is live music, which the artists liken - somewhat indecently - to a woman in a state of unending pleasure.
There's a virtual religion in Ukraine; it's made of the numbers printed on greenbacks
And so these three collectives all see themselves as a possible alternative to moneyed, glossy songwriting, which has lost all connection to native territories, be they in Kharkov, Kiev, or Minsk. The deep-set sadness of Zapaska, Silver Wedding, and Orkestr Che is similar in that they all insist songwriting should first reveal the enduring melancholy of local experience in order - also through music! - to then imagine a better social sphere.
Hence the theatricality: perhaps the connections between stage and audience might prove themselves a microcosm of some bigger, better realm?
If so, then listeners will first have to be shocked out of their familiarity with glitz, glamor, and primetime banality. And that leads to the final question asked of Orkestr Che by the Kharkov press: "Do you like shocking people?" "No, but we have to. Constantly." Audiences members are taken aside, one by one, and told the awful truth. It's for their own good.
Comments
Login / Register