Nocturne for Rain-Pipe Flute
Jazz and noise-music (bruitism, noise, industrial) are of the same age from the perspective of history. There was even a period in the history of the first avant-garde, when one was taken for the other. But this was not the case for long. More important is something else: “if you had only known where ‘jazz’ was born, you would not pronounce its name out loud”, as one of the founders of jazz said.
Besides, do not trust fully those pop-rock critics for whom in “noise” the most important thing is the “hateful atmosphere and intensive and blind energy”.
But – just imagine! – this jumble has even entered our literary classics. Do you remember in Ilya Ilf’s and Evgeny Petrov’s novel “The Twelve Chairs” a parody of Meyerhold’s theater with the “Orchestra of Ersmarch’s Jugs”…? And this “clyster battalion” plays the “negro dance ‘The Antelope at the Source of the Zambezi.’” Is that amusing? Perhaps! Is it informative? In fairness, at the present time, no longer so, especially if the question is “the first in the RSFSR eccentric jazz-band orchestra of Valentin Parnakh”, as well as Parnakh himself, who dances his “Giraffe-like monument”… For that matter – remember the fate of the theater itself, the stage manager and the outstanding poet-translator – indeed, the first to implement the theory and practice of this art in our country!
And what if I were to tell you that the person who theoretically substantiated the significance of noise for music (under the general appellation of “dissonance”) was the theoretician of art Nikolai Kulbin, and his precedence was officially recognized by the leader of Italian futurism Marinetti, who in 1914 visited St. Petersburg upon the invitation of Kulbin himself (who, incidentally, similarly to Vyacheslav Gaivoronsky, was a physician by his education, an officer and an associate of the Military Medical Academy of St. Petersburg)? In addition to the “intonarumori” – the instruments themselves and one supposedly genuine gramophone record – it seems that nothing has remained from the music of the Futurists. Not without reason Igor Stravinsky called them “not airplanes, as they wished to see themselves, but, at all events, a swarm of very illustrious, noisy wasps”.
But the aesthetics of “noise” let itself be felt, in one way or another: it appears in the percussion intermission music to Shostakovich’s opera “The Nose”, George Antheil’s “Ballet Mechanique” and Edgard Varese’s “Ionization”. Later it appears in John Cage and the Hollywood all around handyman Henry Brant (in his absolute music, a Dadaist and satirist, similarly to Sudnick and Gaivoronsky joined together); in the musique concrete (“tape music”) by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henri, in jazz (let us remember the very noisy introduction to “Round Midnight” by George Russel with a congenial solo by Eric Dolphy and the prescient “Jazz et Jazz” for ensemble and electronic sounds by yet another Frenchman – musicologist and jazz musician André Odair).
Until gradually noise finally made its presence felt in rock music as well, starting with the Canadian group NSB (Nihilist Spam Band) – from 1965 – and the notorious post/industrial already in the 1970s – put on whomever you want yourselves: for example, the mocking “Throbbing Gristle” or the light-minded “Cleaning Woman”; and do not forget Nikolai Sudnick’s group “Zga”, as effective – scenic and witty as its very title. And even honored to open “Orbitones, Spoon Harps & Bellowphones”, the audio-chrestomathy of “experimental sonar instruments” (with an introduction of not just somebody, but Tom Waits)… As a matter of fact, “Zga” remains the best testimony of the intensity of the creative endeavors of the Soviet pre-perestroika underground, a time when the “masses could no longer live as before” (while the leaders still “wanted to”). Following the formula – if the numerator was DIY + «objets trouvés» (“do it yourself” on “found objects”, as it is called here, although we could have remembered for a while that in France this is how the “lost and found department” is called), then in the denominator the energetics of the “rock industrial” + the improvisational jazz freedom of collective self-expression + the discipline of “rock in opposition”. Properly, one of its leaders is Chris Cutler. Only five years has elapsed from the time of recording (still in Sudnick’s apartment in Riga) the first “homemade” magnetic album to the compilation “Riga” on Chris Cutler’s label “ReR”. It must be said, though, that from the wagon springs and metal sheets of the “Zga” to the new “electronic” Sudnick the same distance is spanned as from the first “concrete” attempts with the audio tape to “acousmatics”. And between them was the replication of the historical Italian Futurism with Alexander Lebedev-Frontov (“Vetrophonia” [“Windophony”]), as well as attempts at improvisational, but essentially not jazz-type collective improvisation (FIGS). And parallel to this – a long-term collaboration with Vyacheslav Gaivoronsky (and at a certain time also with his – Gaivoronsky’s, that is – accordionist-vocalist Evelina Petrova). As a performer, Gaivoronsky, in his turn, is also taking part in Sudnick’s newest “sympho-project”: “Opera of the Eighteenth Hour” (also in memory of an outstanding person – the soon, all too soon departed from life Willi Melnikov) and other operas of the cycle.
Vyacheslav Gaivoronsky – unlike the rock opposition figure Sudnick – was listed as a favorite of still the Soviet (neo) jazz elite: in the 1980s the “Leningrad duo” (with Vladimir Volkov) was the only ensemble which could have rivaled in its popularity with the trio “Ganelin-Tarasov-Chekasin”. Could have, if the creative individuality of Gaivoronsky – the ideal “free artist”, who willfully secluded himself in an “ivory tower” – could be squeezed into the framework of the mainstream (in reality, there was never any rivalry between them; on the contrary, in 2017 Vladimir Chekasin and Vyacheslav Gaivoronsky performed together several times: on Gaivoronsky’s 70th birthday in St. Petersburg and on the “triple jubilee” with Vladimir Tarasov in Moscow). Gaivoronsky consistently experiments with all the possible (and impossible, in the sense of being imaginary) forms and genres of world music – from Russian ethnic music and Bach to the traditions of the East and the rock music of the “Aquarium” (in one number, incidentally, Sudnick joins him). And in the trio with Andrei Kondakov they also released a compact disc “Russian art songs. Homage to Dargomyzhsky” and Soviet songs (“O lyubvi ne govori” [“Do not speak about love”]). Naturally, the field of view of Gaivoronsky the experimenter could not possibly bypass Sudnick’s “Futurosis”, at the same time when Sudnick was composing his grandiose “sympho-rock-cantata” the “Carmina Moriturorum” involving the Opus Posth chamber ensemble in memory of Nikolai Dmitriev. As such, the founder of the “Dom” center and “Long Arms” (with Sergei Kuryokhin) was also able to produce the first “Delicatessen”. But the compact disc was released in 2005, already posthumously. At that time Dmitriev joyfully picked up the image of the “delicatessen” – “that which is tasty and unusual”, to which “one must not turn every day”. “Delicatessen II”, recorded seemingly still in the mood of the first “Delicatessen” in 2009, differ from them in principle. If the first, in Dmitriev’s expression, present a “festivity”, the second are “a nocturne for a rain-pipe flute”. It is a nocturne – in the literal meaning of the word, a night torrent of the collective subconscious between awakening and sleep, when one’s almost entire life flows by – from top to bottom. According to my subjective perception, this is a substrate of all of Gaivoronsky’s music – for example, the Second String Quartet (compare with the finale of Dmitri Shostakovich’s 15th Symphony). Not a chance occurrence, if on the first compact disc of the “Delicatessen” in 12 movements – paradoxically – there are 15 separate movements (three more bonuses), here all 9 form a single and continuous whole, vita ipsa (if we make use of Sudnick’s favorite dead language – Latin).
It must be said that Latin, as well as large-scale (one may say, academic) forms express a subconscious aspiration to transform into musical symbolism an “everyday” perception of noises (in the final, 9th composition of the present compact disc one may hear a measured sound of a working mechanism, for example, a moving train). Of course, notwithstanding any aspiration, it is not possible to discard realism.
So Sudnick and Gaivoronsky create a new – third – quality from the combination of the noise-related realism with musical abstractionism. The same “motive of the train” is perceived as a stubborn ostinato, as in boogie-woogie (in Gaivoronsky’s music, just about the only time one can sense jazz phrasing), and not by chance do the realistic sounds of the bells in the 7th number generate associations with Mussorgsky’s operas, while in the 8th number they pass onto a Zen-Buddhist ritual. In all possibility, this could be called a dialectic “unity of opposites” or – better yet – the Jungian “syzygy”.
Albeit, of course, one cannot avoid also musical associations proper – related to genre (the funeral march on the fifth minute of the 4th track) and even quotations (from “Carmen” and from “A-tisket, a-tasket”, the first, albeit “children’s” hit of Ella Fitzgerald on the 8th track).
So, as a result, everything falls into place. This seemingly “children’s song” returns us to the 2nd track, the “leitmotif of childhood”. Albeit, compared with the classics, here everything is turned inside out: the remembrance of far-away childhood (after everything experienced – see the Funeral March) – is in a clear major key, while the beginning of life is in a dim minor key.
And at certain times somewhere in the background there emerges the Japanese modality (the pentatonic scale with the half-tone) – an insinuation that it is possible to glance at the “sound-noises” also from some kind of third angle – similar to the several events in Akira Kurosawa’s film “Rashomon” accompanied with Ravel’s Bolero. Maybe, this is why the culmination – an impulsive intensity of emotions (7th track) and a retrospective of the entire life (8th track) are followed by the coda – a train. Obviously – in motion. Maybe to a third part? The conclusion of a “Trilogy?”
Dmitry Ukhov (Translated by Anton Rovner)
credits
released November 5, 2018
recorded and mixed by nick sudnick, Jan.2009,at ZGA studio
nick sudnick - sound objects,composition;
vyacheslav gayvoronsky - trumpet
The experimental Russian band ZGA was founded in 1984. The leader of the band Nick Sudnick explores the limits of sound
using the elements of noise, industrial, avant-rock, traditional and classical music. He developed the unique sound objects called zgamoniums. His latest visionary project "24 Rush Hours" represents a series of operas and this massive piece of work is still in progress....more
A collection of tracks from the singer and multi-disciplinary artist's 111 collaboration series, featuring KMRU, Laraaji, and others. Bandcamp New & Notable Apr 25, 2024
