Four releases this weekend, emerging from various cities around Russia, offer multiple ways to counter dull or disappointing actuality. They include sleep, recreational drugs, fatherhood, and a stubborn optimism.
A collection of abstract hip-hop, bass, and techno recordings has just come from the Siberian webzine, "Big Echo." Compiled in honor of Counterculture Day, these tracks help to connect some very cold locations with... Santa Cruz.
Bass tunes and hip-hop instrumentals have arrived from Vladivostok, Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kiev. Three of them imagine the emotional and mental benefits of intuitive composition. Our fourth artist is less sure.
These performers come from two locations: Moscow and the banks of the Volga. They're connected not so much by parallel or local scenes as by the sense of landscape. A single - enormous - country links isolated efforts.
Some lyrical publications from Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Penza are full this week of boyish memories. All these performers hope to preserve pre-adult enthusiasm and naivety from subsequent disappointment.
A host of excellent glitch-hop recordings has appeared this week: all the way from the Pacific Coast to rural Lithuania. Many of them share an enthusiasm for metaphors of flight, fantasy, and family.
These artists from Ufa, St. Petersburg, and Chelyabinsk all employ lo-fi media, antique recordings, or old movie scripts. In doing so, they reconsider a classic Russian plot device: the view of liberty as "descent."
From Orenburg, close to the Kazakhstan border, comes a collection of instrumental hip-hop from JGorsh. That spatial distance is then viewed in biographical terms by St Petersburg's Morning Records. Childhood memories are cherished...
Three gentle releases have just appeared from Ukrainian and Russian downtempo artists. Using colleagues from Estonia and Kazakhstan, they sketch some common views on romance - and what color it might be...
Ritmo and Nikita Zabelin both have new work on display. Born of hip-hop and techno, the recordings offer a very quiet, locally specific variation upon those traditions
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