Russian Pop

One major paradox in Russian independent music today comes from its relationship to the internet, in particular to portals. Supposedly the freest of digital spaces, portals nonetheless compel musicians to tag their works generically as rock, pop, underground, alternative, and so forth. Portals rarely put forward more than fifteen such terms. Even when an occasional and more finessed dance site, such as promodj.ru offers extra subgenres - in this case almost fifty - there’s always an unavoidable dissonance between the download of an activity (of a future musical process) and its definition beforehand with old fixed categories. Several events in March and April have underscored this very basic and undesirable question: “What exactly is the name of our shared and future activity? What do we call it before we even start?” The authority of old names in unfamiliar situations (the weight of tradition upon novelty) was recently expressed with clarity on the new album from Provoda: “When it hurts, when things are dark, I listen to ‘Kino’ really loud…” It’s hard to tell whether this is ironic. Probably not.

The weight of preexisting titles and factions is also evident if we look at other new releases and anniversaries this month. Iuliia Chicherina celebrated ten years of creative work, including, of course, her participation in the retro-project Prikliucheniia elektronikov, which in turn marked its own seventh birthday. These performers have obviously made wise career decisions. Meanwhile Iuta, who has also been a guest artist in Prikliucheniia, released her new album “Posle”; it shows the same trouble in abandoning the names of tradition. Most of the album’s tracks have been published before; their republication offers both financial survival for the artist and sentimental refuge for the listeners, who read that tracklisting before they buy the album’s new songs.

The RAIG website, for example, recently published a furious denial that the new album by Ia sverkhu sleva could be listed as “rock” or with any other “cliche” (shablon). Abandoning one shablon for another, however, simply creates a new need to define your new location. Take the Smert’fest on April 12, starring Psikheia, Sakura, PTVP, 7000$, and Otomoto; the event, even before it began, called itself “an alternative to the alternative.” But what exactly is that “non-genre” and what is it called? This music, somewhat strangely, must always define itself by negation. It always needs to say what it’s not.

Independent songwriting is, therefore, both nowhere and nothing in particular. This is especially ironic when we remember that B2 have decided to take web-based music pirates to court. The predicament here is, of course, that nobody knows where they are, either! Just like those pirates, Shnur and Leningrad have now returned to Moscow, because the Luzhkov legislation banning them from the capital has expired. During that period in exile the band had performed in secret for closed, corporate events; they stayed away from all spaces fixed by the terms of civic decree.

In this same admirable state of quiet mobility, Noel Gallagher flew to Moscow on 23 March and played a touchingly earnest, acoustic version of The Smiths’ “There Is a Light.” He said remarkably little(!)… and then left. Deti Picasso, Messer Chups, and Markscheider Kunst came similarly together at the Jack Daniels Festival, creating a brief collective event despite the March weather. There’s a thin line, however, between the desire to create novel, fleeting activities and a need to do so, forced by the fickle music business. In the last few weeks, for example, there has been little agreement over what “ViaGra” means at the moment. Rumors abounded until 11 April that clauses in the performers’ contracts had forbidden “sex and/or pregnancy,” causing the women to quit, one after the other. The term “ViaGra” would like to represent a fixed membership and changing repertoire, not the opposite. Even the stubborn meaning of well-known names and assemblages can be undermined by capital, such that “market pressures” start to look like “creativity.”

This, obviously, is not just a domestic problem. PunkTV, who presented their second album to the public on 3 April, have enjoyed some recent attention from the BBC, where they were likened to the Chemical Brothers. Here the problem arises again of not wanting to name your work. PunkTV, if anything, invoke other parallels, in particular the drums of Stephen Morris and bass of Peter Hook - the unique rhythm section created with legendary meticulousness by Martin Hannett. These are sounds (not words) so deeply entrenched in today’s soundscape that Hook has even formed a band this spring made from four bass players! PunkTV employ that British brand or tradition without slavishness, without naming it. They do so with sufficient subtlety that even British listeners misrecognize it.

Newcomers and Some New Names for their Work
In a month where Pelageia and Gudimov have released splendid reinterpretations of histories both private (Okean El’zy) and public (folk music), the new contributions to SpecialRadio’s playlist contextualizes issues of tradition, the names of established genres, and innovation. Nobody shows this competition more clearly than Yaroslavl’s Angelique. Clumsily defined by the national press as “synth-pop-cool-jazz,” the band tries to reject all these terms by creating another one: “dark-pop.” These ongoing verbal competitions between music and long-established classifications perhaps underline the impossibility of naming any ongoing event once and for all.

The strongest sense of respect for established traditions this month lies with Mars Attacks, whose members all have 10-19 years of professional experience behind them; their vocalist Sergei Oganov even sounds on occasion like Aleksandr Gradskii. Their grand songs hold proudly onto custom, as do Novosibirsk's Kukhnia. Although much quieter, Kukhnia’s largely acoustic jams certainly recall the happier, messier moments of early Akvarium performances. The band themselves eulogize bards of the ‘60s and “beautiful, lyrical Russian rock” in their promotional materials. These three ensembles form a serious, respectful tie with past musical values. They shy away from the horrors of today’s tawdry pop. In that connection it’s interesting to see how many of the bands this month bring to mind performers like Siutkin or Aguzarova, from a time when “neo-stilyaga” syncopation became so important for Russian songwriting. If we add these tendencies to the style of Ol’ga Arefe’eva, then we have Katia Chikvina (celebrated last month in “Moskovskii muzykant”) or Tan-Dem, whose self-confessed “pop-rock” chanteuse on occasion even moves towards the drama of early Vika Tsyganova.

Siutkin and Bravo are an important reference point here. Despite sounding terribly outdated today, they represent a moment when Russian pop music tried, tongue-in-cheek, to operate outside of established institutions and categories. It had big dreams but doubted its potential and therefore made big use of irony. One could argue that bands such as Zveri today try (with difficulty) to distance themselves from the pomp of institutionalized rock; therefore adopt a more buoyant style, unwilling to embrace any one, serious pose. Saint Petersburg’s Tatlem give voice to elements of that philosophy a la Bravo; the band is seriously playful and therefore avoids clear definitions. “You might call us rock… with the prefixes soft-, pop-, and art-.” Odessa’s Maxiwave joke on their website that the only way to fix their identity once and for all is to pay a visit to OVIR!

The spirited hi-hat at the start of Perpetuum Mobile’s track introduces almost four minutes that clearly evoke Roman Bilyk and company. This band, which comes from Kurgan in Western Siberia, calls its technique “pop-funk-rock-fusion… but whatever it is, Mobile gathers new fans with each appearance.” In the same way, Retype embody elements of recent Agata Kristi recordings, yet make them modern enough to produce a sound that brings to mind The Killers. The same could be said of Gorod N or Slaidy (Komsomol’sk-na-Amure), who – once more with foregrounded cymbals – grant their numbers a free-flowing, amateurish spontaneity. Consequently, it’s much harder for the musicians to define themselves: “Low-fi, brit-pop, indie-pop, or pop-rock….”

Syncopation and unpredictability are heard clearer still among those ensembles that turn directly to jazz. Avakara (Sochi) are an interesting example. Perhaps because they’ve played at several of the southern “bard-festivals,” we hear echoes of Vladimir Shakhrin’s famous warble, but musically we’re much closer to cocktail lounges. Berkut (i.e., Vadim Pogorelov) performs a similar trick, combining a melancholy vocal with the type of light busking style we’d associate with Pavel Kashin. Pogorelov suggests that we listen to the song with closed eyes, so that “visual images” arise beyond or before any linguistic definitions. Konstantin Levin’s track “Prostit’sia” goes one step further. On top of lazy, jazzy instrumentals, an essentially serious vocal is so dramatically distorted that the song in toto sits in between seriousness and silliness. Its peculiarities make it one of the most interesting contributions this month, especially in the wider context of his first-rate work with Ksenia Bryzhataia and Shvadah.

EzPresso stay away from silliness, however; together with Radiozebra, they offer the kind of jazz-pop syncopations that have worked so well in the recent “Ia risuiu” from Gosti iz Budushchego. EzPresso in fact credit their approach to a serious, even broader range of genres: “Trance, new age… acid jazz, jazz funk, lounge, neo-soul, plus R&B…”

Some of the April offerings, of course, abandon all such pretence at generic melanges and head for the mother lode: pop, pure and simple. Here parallels are possible with some major estrada stars. The opening drums of “Proshchai” from Moscow’s Karat give voice to both confidence and a generic clarity. Karat’s vocalists, long-term friends Sasha and Iana, craft a more fashionable version of Nepara. Valeri Lerua uses a related trick to underline this yearning for primetime; as her track opens, an English radio announcer speaks from distant Massachusetts; a place the wistful singer will reach, come what may. Irina Rakitina (Nal’chik) brings distant, yet equally familiar Asian themes into her romantic “Obnazhennoe tango,” just as Blestiashchie did for their “Vostochnye skazki” album in 2005. Her second track even recalls a young Natasha Koroleva. All these songs, despite insufficient funding and related problems of production standards, dream big. They hope, like Klipsa (originally from Tashkent) to embody a “positive tendency among all those depressing pop and rock performers.”

Nobody, of course, has done so with more success than Tatu. The band London and Lolitta (sic.) have taken the early aesthetic of Tatu’s first album and now refashioned it as an “English” schoolgirl who regularly blogs for her fans. Both London and Klipsa aim for Shapovalov’s production values. In the process they hope (again like their more famous colleagues) to characterize what they call “techno-manga-rock,” in other words well-produced, self-assured, and well-financed pop – just like Katina and Volkova.

Perhaps the most generically clear-cut track this month is the bubblegum sound of “Skuchaiu” by Valenti, a charming number that could very easily be taken from an early CD by Natali. The dreams of Valenti, Karat, or Orenburg’s Anastasiia Plokhotskaia (whose “Prosti” suggests a grown-up Maksim) are very sincere. They are also in the minority. Most of this month’s new offerings are underwritten by irony, the unwillingness to be pigeonholed, or the inability to name an ongoing activity with a single term. Even the most confident of performers here are nicely undercut by the “pop-synth-dance” of “Ptenets” by Kanikuly, a genuinely funny track that deflates the pathos in many of today’s maudlin ditties. The brief, pointed self-deprecation in this number is a valuable reminder of the unavoidable distance between words and music, genres and events, categories and experiment, between the comfortable past and a riskier, more interesting future. Kanikuly, in making their joke, both accept and reject the same aesthetic simultaneously. It’s hard to say where they are or what they’re doing: a positive dilemma that obliges me to conclude this discussion.