Staraya derevnya - Garden window escape

A Closer Listen

The delightfully different Staraya derevnya, now seven strong, returns this spring with another unusual album.  The first sessions took place in London, later recordings were made in Bulgaria, Israel and Mexico, and the sparse lyrics combine Russian and invented languages, making the music feel as if it is from no place and every place.  The distinct timbres of oud, flute, santur, wheel lyre and marching band kazoo contribute to the otherworldly feel, while the continued inspiration of artist-poet Arthur Molev amplifies the intrigue.

As Gosha Hniu starts to sing, a collage of sounds is constructed behind him, something like a barnyard symphony crossed with a jam band high-stepping through an international marketplace.  Beneath this lies a more traditional underpinning, represented by the steady bassline and the drums.  “What I keep in my closet” flips the script, placing percussion atop a bed of drone.  It’s rare for an album to sound as if it comes from an undiscovered country, part civilized and part untamed, but this is the impact of the music.  One drifts into wonder and is tempted to paint what one hears, the playful works of Molev suggesting a wide palette.

The 12-minute “Half-deceased uncle” feels like being plunged into the heart of a forest in which both the natives and the other creatures play instruments.  There’s time for solos, but not in any traditional manner; when one player is highlighted, the others continue to play, undaunted, in the background.  Every once in a while the bass returns to anchor the proceedings, and one clings to the repeated lines as one would a map in the wilderness.  One can also imagine the track as two civilizations meeting and mingling, turning babble into conversation.

The album’s shortest track, “Virtue of standing still,” sounds like a massive party, the kazoo and drums shouting their exuberance.  One imagines cake, cameras and smiles.  The steady tempo lends itself well to marching around an honored friend or relative.  Put simply, it’s a whole lot of fun.  In contrast, the title track sounds like a dark ambient nightmare populated by mischievous sprites.  Quiet to start, it builds in intensity, a Grimm’s fairy tale of sound.  In the closing minute, the instruments fuse into a sonic wall, leaving “Myshhh” to restore the restive feeling.  In Hindi, myshhh means sweet.

Undefinable and uncategorizable, Staraya derevnya continues to make music that dances on the edge of a flat world, ready to fall off the edge; and yet no matter how hard it teeters, it retains its balance.  We’ve heard no other music like this, but we’re glad it exists.  (Richard Allen)

The Free Jazz Collective 0

By Nick Ostrum

One might say Krautrock, as variegated as it was, was an attempt to remake something German in an environment wherein the immediate past, and even the idea of the Volk, was severely tainted. In that sense, it was a type of reinvention of tradition out of the scraps left by the collapse of the Nazi regime and driven by a hopeful futurist orientation. By the time the industrial wave of Krautrocker experimentalists was coming into its own in the early 1980s, this optimism had collapsed, but that pursuit of making music out of one’s environment that reflected those same environments remained.

Staraya Derevnya, whose Garden Window Escape drops May 2 (today!), describe their music as “Krautfolk,” and, with the understanding of folk outlined above, I hear it. This sounds like an attempt to take the clamorous chthonic-space warp tradition now associated with the heavier reaches of German movement and refract it through various electronics to create something that reflects our fracturing contemporary moment. It is an attempt to convey stories and impressions of life non-linearly, and the distortions and strangeness help only help those sentiments land. Still, I am not sure what to call this. Kosmische Musik 3.0, or whichever version we are running now? Post-industrial Krautrock, redesigned and reinvigorated, with greater attention to computer electronics and EAI techniques that have developed over the last half-century? Is Krautfolk really enough? Then again, such a fixation on previous styles is problematic, as it limits the creative impetus behind the work. And this album, Garden Window Escape, is intensely creative and, in that, deeply effective. When I first inserted this into my car CD player, it moved me in a way few albums do these days. My heart started pounding.

Staraya Derevnya is the transnational ensemble of leader Gosha Hniu (cries and whispers, wheel lyre, marching band kazoo, percussion and objects), Maya Pik (synthesizer, flute, drum machine), Ran Nahmias (silent cello, santur, oud), Grundik Kasyansky (feedback synthesizer), Miguel Pérez (guitars), Yoni Silver (bass clarinet), and Andrea Serafino (drums). Its members are strewn across the UK, Mexico, Bulgaria, and Israel, which makes it all the more remarkable that they have been a band since 1994.

The soundworld Staraya Derevnya creates is dark, marauding, and disorienting, often tattered but with an underlying warmth. It is atavistic and ritualistic, complete with perplexing chants and whispers, repeated and incrementally broken from words into cryptic syllabic fragments. (Hniu starts a mix of his Russian [he is originally from Ukraine] and invented words, and trudges along, sound by sound, from there.) Simple melodies loop and layer on crackling backgrounds on haunted long tones. The band also deploys the driving industrial thrum and thud that underlies dancehall music, almost in the way the Kenyan duo Duma does, to great effect. Rather than veering so far into harsh noise, however, Staraya Derevnya deploy a rough psychedelia, patchwork sound snippets, heavy synth, gravelly frictions, and various vocal oddities, shrieks, and oddly juxtaposed acoustic instruments – various strings, bass clarinet, flute, unnamed percussion. There is just so much going on here. It sends the mind in spirals.

Garden Window Escape is arresting, if nothing else. It has been on constant rotation since it arrived in the mail. It has also sent me scrambling to revisit my old Einstürzende Neubauten and Sprung aus den Wolken albums. It fits among them because it sounds rooted, but also fresh and jarring. And this is just the kind of thing I need right now. It wrestles with a precarious present by drawing continuities with an uncertain past, while carving out its own space. In that act, Staraya Derevnya construct something new out the wreckage.

One of my favorites of the year.

Garden Window Escape will be available as a download and LP from Bandcamp:

Garden window escape by staraya derevnya

Video: Staraya Derevnya - What I keep in my closet