source: http://www.moscow.ucla.edu/?p=2272
"Yesterday an important recording from last year reappeared on shop shelves. It involves two Russian musicians - Aleksei Borisov and Evgenii Voronovskii (aka Cisfinitum) - plus their Madrid-based colleague, Miguel Ruiz.
Using a rare, if not forgotten form of creative interaction - “mail art” - together with overt references to the droning backdrop that once framed Iurii Gargarin, “Ornaments” is a telling example of how Russia’s classic experimenters are engaging today’s social networks of virtuality. They do so with stamps, mailmen, and the re-referencing of a spacewalk 47 years ago.
“Old school,” in several senses.
Borisov is something of a legend in Russian experimental electronica. Although by education a political historian, he was quickly involved in music after graduating from Moscow State University. Despite the cultural difficulties of being in the Soviet Union of the early ’80s, Borisov was able to work with several outfits who stayed abreast of fashions in European music, such as new wave, ska, and electronica. The struggle between art and academia began… By 1989 he had abandoned his job as a researcher in Moscow’s Institute of International Relations and decided to embrace music professionally.
Needless to say, after 1991 Borisov’s opportunities for travel, together with access to foreign media, grew swiftly. Perhaps his two most notable collaborations have been with the electro-industrial folk ensemble Volga and the avantgarde jazz collective, Gosplan Trio. Our brief notes, nonetheless, cannot do justice to the enormous range of festival performances in Borisov’s CV. He also has much experience as a DJ - though on the basis of “Ornaments” alone, newcomers would be unlikely to boogie… It’s not exactly hi-NRG.
Borisov’s output was - and remains - adamantly committed to the removal of generic borders. He also sees his discography in the broader context of lessening geographic specificity, too. It’s something of a post-imperial gesture:
“I’m not aiming to combine intellectualism with music, I’m just incorporating my background - both professionally and as general experience - into forms of musical expression. I think it’s pretty important not to deny who you are and where you’re coming from, not to try and follow the standards of the international electronic music scene, even, but to bring something idiosyncratic to it. Something personal.” A tightly-cordoned realm becomes nowhere in particular.
The story of “Ornaments” maps these ideas and intentions very nicely. Perhaps its most striking expression of erasure - and of unexpected, new interaction - comes in the context of generational difference(s). Despite Borisov’s senior standing in this fleetingly composed trio of himself (above), Voronovskii (below), and Ruiz, he is responsible for the most fashionable and arguably youthful aspect of “Ornaments” - its rhythm section.
The ominous drone that marks most of the work is increasingly punctuated by the distant bursts of a drum machine. These are Borisov’s rhythms, as Voronovskii remembers.
“I edited the [initial ambient] mix that Miguel had sent me, and then I added some rhythmic elements that I had in supply. When I listened back to it all, I came to the conclusion that there were still gaps in the work. And that’s what we managed to fill with some of Aleksei’s materials. They’d been lying around in the studio for more than a year, waiting their turn. They were on a disc of analog drum-machine stuff; things that Aleksei had recorded a long time ago.”
“Once I had put those rhythms into the recording, then it was clear we had to get his voice and guitar in there, too..! I think the result is something very uncharacteristic for the three of us. It’s a kind of dark ambient work with trance rhythms.”
This was not a fast process: Ruiz (above) and Voronovskii exchanged tapes by mail for almost nine months before Borisov’s contribution was included. Voronovskii made a trip to Madrid; Ruiz made a trip to Iaroslavl… and so on.
Trip after trip, layer after layer, the work slowly came together in defiance of genres, geography - and impending geriatrics.
Thus there emerged an authorless tale made “nowhere in particular” and begun by a Spaniard who was “charmed by the snowy landscapes of Russia.” In fact, after the release of “Ornaments,” Ruiz would say that these same (visibly) empty spaces had directly inspired the audible textures of the CD.
The album’s nine tracks were designed to embody not only the boundless, ever-opening fields of snow, but the kind of vacuous soundscapes that allowed Ruiz to express his “love and respect for Iurii Gagarin - in fact for all the early cosmonauts.”
“The main aim of ‘Ornaments’ is to combine two kinds of meditative and hypnotic music: trance and drone-ambient; to put some trance in drone and vice versa. The artists take the main hypnotic structures of trance and drone (straight bass-drum and hum) and put them together. And they do without melodies. At least there are no melodies in their natural form: one has to catch or imagine them in noise patterns.”
Four men in the middle of nowhere: Borisov, Voronovskii, Ruiz, and a bewildered reviewer. Forty-seven years after the event that inspired them, in the middle of a snowy field they start to establish new networks with the help of a very old metaphor and a handful of dog-eared stamps.
How Russian."
"Ornaments" avaliable for download here
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