Port Mone

Three very different releases are on offer from Moscow, St. Petersburg and Kiev/Minsk. Whatever their stylistic disparities, though, they all draw upon the power of landscape and its ability to counter modernity's failures.

Four bands from Moscow, Riga, and Minsk all work hard to avoid the limitations of language and other formal constraints. What lies beyond the security of tradition, however, is far from clear...

The ensembles under discussion here all make direct and profitable use of folkloric tradition. They do so, however, in ways that allow for greater experimentation - without falling to iconoclastic silliness. In careful, considered patterns, custom is used to engender novelty.

Port Mone and Swing Couture are from Minsk and St Petersburg. Although their uses of folk and gypsy tradition differ, these two ensembles evoke the sounds of prior decades - bound by similar and often tragic experience

The image above shows a group of freezing musicians in December last year getting ready for the painfully long and uncomfortable bus ride from Minsk, Belarus to Moscow. They were preparing to host a mini-festival in the Russian capital, designed to showcase their nation's new music under the ban...