GULTSKRA ARTIKLER – moreprodukt

(CD/download, nexsound)

To people with an open ear for unusual sounds or at least the unusual connection of sounds, the name of Alexey Devyanin might be of some meaning, or at least his monikers of Stud and Gultska Artikler and the connected releases on Autoplate, Acediamusic, Kikapu, Kahvi and others. He comes from a city that most people in my surrounding would associate with 10 months of freezing cold and the other two months it is stone cold winter-time: Novosibirsk. The outmost post of civilization in the Russian empire for so long, a nightmare coming from post-war / post-Stalin-era tales, a headshaking image of really having to live in a place as hostile and unfriendly as this one. The image, as usual, is not true. A friend of mine took a trip to hike some pars of the Baikal Sea and the pictures and tales he brought back were beautiful. Some of them were frightening, too, but maybe we should leave it at that. Suffice it to say that the prejudicial images of Siberia are coming up here and there with the music on “moreprodukt”, and I would be hard pressed to say if the images influenced the music or the music enforced the images. If Devyanin would come from Hawai or the equator, I don’t think these sounds would evade more cold air and freezing echoes, if he would have recorded them as such at all.

For instance “prostokvasha” has the sweeping of freezing wind on a clear night as well as the thud-thud-thud of a big military helicopter. If that doesn’t say Russia or even Siberia I don’t know what. Within the eclectic mixture of self-produced sounds and field recordings Devyanin tells us a story that has child’s laughter as well as the shutter of a camera slowly turning into the reload action of a gun (on “mehanik” with beautiful subsea tones in the background), strings and other sounds from prepared instruments, glitches and peeps. The structure ranges from almost random to a refined aesthetic that is almost somewhere in the vicinity of late night bar jazz. For instance the bitpart with sampled piano-chords of some early jazz on “v korobke trubacheva” or as an even better example on “krasnie glotai”, where there are parts of such a designed beauty and well harmonizing elegance, with chords of guitar gently filling a scraped bass and some small percussions here and there, but with time the balance turns and more and more noises, sudden feeps and crackles arise until that beauty is gone. This track ends with a purely mechanic noise, including tape hiss of the factory field recording, which translates into an introduction for the next track. Therefore it is obvious that not only the single tracks but also their ranking within the album has been carefully constructed.

Note how music as deconstructed and destructive as this kind of fringe noise – would you play this to your mother at a formal family dinner? – nevertheless demands so much control and diligence in its construction. Isn’t that a terrible or at least frightening paradoxon. It is true, to enforce the level of entropy in any system, you need to gain control of the main influencing factors of that system. In finality, this is just a consequence of the utter inability of humanity to control anything. Even in experimental situations in laboratories, the idea of complete control is bound to fail. We live with the imagination of control over our daily lives and our overall existence, but from time to time existential experiences (birth, death, sickness, natural deseasters, the radiance of a beautiful young girl, etc.) will give us a show of how little we are really able to control. Seems to me that Devyanin dwells in the fascination of that idea, to be able to control at least sounds within a certain amount of time, putting them together and producing a work of art from that. But then again I am reminded (once again) by the noises from the street, the voices I hear through these thin walls or the rumble of my stomach, that this kind of control ends really early.