KALUTALIKSUAK – last day of sun
(CD – R.A.I.G.)
I am more than partial to all
kinds of religions, ie. I don’t like religions very much. Actually, I
don’t even care for those endogenious mythologies practiced by peoples and
tribes in various remote places of the planet. The Eskimo (or rather Innuit)
mythology is an exception to this, because if you decide to live in eternal
ice and in places where the sun goes down and doesn’t show up for two
months, then I guess you need something special to hang on to. Moreover, the
way the shamans of Innuit tribes used to digest all kinds of drugs andmagic
mushrooms, then went into twilight zones to battle evil spirits or against
other shamans, tended to produce all kinds of cool stories with all kinds of
interesting characters in there.
Kalutaliksuak is the name of
the goddess of Ice in Innuit mythology, and she is as evil as she is dumb,
which never is a fine mixture, especially when you are under the guidance of
this god. Kalutaliksuak is also the name of a Russian avantgarde prog-rock
band that has recorded the best fusion-jazz album with a religious
background ever since John McLaughlin decided to dabble with the Inner
Mountain Flame. It is obvious, I don’t know much about fusion jazz apart
from my regular dosis of Agartha and a few dozen albums that return on my
turntable for reasons unknown to me. My personal problem with fusion jazz is
that most of it sounds like random, non-targeted rambling. Why I keep
listening? Because when it hits, then it hits really good. It is a matter of
mood.
This quartet of Alexander
Chuvakov (guitars, flute, voc), Vladimir Konovkin (Keyboards, Synthesizers),
Sergei Titovetz (drums) and Alexei Ohontzev (Bass) really get going from the
first few notes. Right after a few moments of intro, Chuvakov drops in with
a heavy guitar riff and from that moment on they won’t let go. The whole
album “Last day of sun” is built around one or more – I am really not
sure – rituals of Arctic tribes to appease the sun goddess, or something.
So the first track “Sailing into the sunset to a new night” is split
into 5 “sun phases”, which take up good two thirds of the album. The
mood changes more within a single phase than from one to the next, by the
way, and the ranges include aggressive and disortiented wailing and
noodling, heavy pounding jazz rock and some guttural speeches and
receptions. From time to time a voice wailes like a banshee (oops, wrong
mythology, I guess) and then everything seems to be drowned in ice cold sea
water. A dark, sombre, potentially fatal and always dangerous surrounding
atmosphere is being presented, a nightly world filled with unnameable
dangers - and it is a grim listening indeed.
It is obvious that the players
on “last day of sun” are professionals with a wide range of abilities
and a deep vision or understanding of what they are about to do. They play
against each other and with each other at the same time. Complicated
structures come from the contradiction or modelling of layers of smaller
parts, yet at all times there is a sense of control that is constantly being
shaken and attacked by its own inherent logical distruction. It is hard to
pin down in purely musical terms, but what you will hear is both free and
constrained at the same time.
