featuring Invisible Hand Distribution

[ormfdmrush]

Last Sunday, the Moscow art- and music club “Dozhd’-Mazhor” hosted an event dedicated to several musicians who are all connected in some way to an organization known, rather mysteriously, as “Invisible Hand Distribution” (IHD). In essence these artists, including the marvellous “Ninja Glam”, are all gathered towards the darker end of the musical spectrum, i.e., dark ambient, drone, and pure noise. The IHD collective is very young and since its inception last summer has been busy - in a most Russian fashion - with the production of various programmatic declarations and manifestos.
The first of them reads as follows (in Russian): “Invisible Hand Distribution dedicates itself to rarely-studied areas of avant-garde art and offers listeners a range of archival recordings from Russian musicians, artists, directors, and performance artists. The fundamental styles of interest to us are authentic, traditional or ritual music; ritual industrial recordings; shamanism; spoken-word performances; rhythm-and-poetry; new improvised music/free jazz; ritual theater; and contemporary prose/poetry. The label aims to use the personal language of artists in order to reveal their meaning not within a cultural context (viewed simply as the inert following of the masses), but rather within the context of life’s transpersonal steps or gradations.”



As we can see, this is no normal PR-blurb.

The text continues by the words of Konstantin Kosenkov, who directs this cultural project, label and archives and creates as musician, writer, publicist, producer: “We use the term ‘objective art’ to designate that which is oriented towards fundamental prehistoric symbols, and not towards sociocultural reflexes. We do not busy ourselves with the resolution of financial problems, nor do we serve any aspect of sociocultural existence. Our goal is to distribute a certain type of information through a series of resurrected, pre-personal, pre-social connections with the world.”
“For all people - without exception - memory plays a vital role in the establishment of these connections: a sense of the past. One’s link to memory is as intimate as love, as the life of your child. It is as tender as memories of your deceased patients or your own childhood. The fundamental theme of our work is that of memory and eternity.”



Three-minute pop songs are hardly likely to fit the bill here, and indeed traditional structures are sidelined in favor of drone-like compositions. Drone even in the Western context would be a fitting soundtrack to the declarations of “Invisible Hand Distribution” in that rhythm and beat-driven structures are removed, thus making counting impossible. All forms of segmentation are absent, including the need for a work to even end at a certain point. These are the sounds of immersion, not of progression. IHD would, in fact, claim them to be the music of retrogression, in the most positive and pre-industrial sense.
Drone music is usually driven by the kinds of sounds that do not need to be micromanaged by a musician: they are established and then, to some degree, run themselves. They also serve no direct function in a work of music: they simply are. This, too, would be useful in the evocation of IHD’s “pre-personal” interests. Drone is constructed upon a note - or countable unit - that becomes a tonality.
One of the bands that helped to build this sense of place at the “Dozhd’-Mazhor” event was “Wrist”, a Moscow outfit based around the efforts of Aleksei Gusakov, who defines his working style with the odd phrase of “Broken Arm Tango.” The images used to promote the band, shown in this post, extend the significance of flexible wrists and broken arms. These categorizations and/or pictures almost all speak to a key theme of disembodiment, of fixed states (such as “individuality”) that are bent, twisted, or dissolved into a whole. Into some kind of state that - once again - simply is. Even in the two tracks offered above we immediately see the same emphases: “A Room with No Walls” (the removal of spatial limit) and “Septic Tank for Dragonflies” (a place of radical decomposition/breakdown).



Gusakov describes his sonic states as follows: “The project aims to create an electroacoustic realm with guitars and percussion that are then combined with an meditative or ritualistic aura. The band has/have been in existence since 2007; the band plays within a very closed musical society. Its members perform drone-industrial music or noise-rock, frequently with recourse to unusual combinations of instruments. The low overtones of a didgeridoo, for example, may go hand-in-hand with a free-jazz saxophone, plus the bass strings of a guitar… Gusakov is accompanied on stage by Anton Ponomarev.”



If IHD sees the ambient atmospheres of drone as an embodiment of ancient history or even eternity, Gusakov interprets his own textures as the music of isolation. “The rare plenitude of this sound-stream and the richness of its overtones together create an atmosphere of solitude. The music summons a strained level of attentiveness in both performer and audience, plunging them together in a state of introverted observation, far beyond the usual ‘tuning’ [i.e., awareness] of our bodies.”

text from article
“Fresh Drone and/or Noise Recordings: Wrist and Hanudata 8”
August 24, 2009



Portal “Far from Moscow: New Music from Russia and Beyond” (http://www.moscow.ucla.edu), designed to showcase new music from Russia, is hosted by the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Los Angeles . It is administered and edited by David MacFadyen (dmacfady@humnet.ucla.edu).