21 Tracks for the 21st Century: Maria Komarova

One of my favourite albums from the past year is “Kombinezon” by Polje; a solo project from Viktor Konstantinov, a talented self-taught musician from Odessa and founder of Liky Pid Nohamy music label. Polje’s music has simple and playful motifs that drift on the waves of different genres without attempting to fit into any of music boxes. In his previous release “Seemed”, Konstantinov describes his music as “(anti-)soviet Jazz type Beats, tropical-Brutalist and raw-synth/New Wave”.

It has been more than a year since the beginning of the full-scale war and invasion in Ukraine. Many musicians and cultural workers are fighting at the frontline. Many keep making arts and music which we have a chance to listen to from calm, blooming places far away, imagining Odessa as it was when the waves of the Black sea drifted without Russian warships (that would better go f--k themselves).

According to Japanese folklore tales, there seems to exist a creature whose name is Yamauba. As it goes, different people claim different things about its appearance. Some say it looks like a woman with long white hair, while others describe it as a monster with no eyes or nose but with a big mouth in the middle of its head. The voice of the creature lead many of those who followed it astray and they have never been found. I imagine them ending up in TEYAS's environment; an abstract opera developed by Warsaw-based audiovisual duo WIDT (Antonina Nowacká – voice; Bogumila Piotrowska – visuals) in collaboration with Berlin-based producer Christoph de Babalon.

Listening to TG11 is like being inside a machine and not being stressed about it. Every track is another machine with its own texture. In R4, you may get an acupuncture massage laying down on the motherboard or get a cup of ginger tea sitting on the leg of the F-transistor. With the use of bass, vibraphone, percussion and synths, the trio of Radian carefully layer both sonic and haptic-like experiences.

Mokh was a solo project of Anton Kryvulia—a musician and conceptual artist from Belarus who has been active in the local underground music scene since the '90s. The album Billion Yellow Birds was created over almost two decades and contains its own poetic imaginarium of symbols of a sort of “distant three-leaf country” with pearls, frogs, dreaming coals and rain as a chief of dandelion. An original master tape was found and (re)released recently by Aliens Institution – a duo of Kryvulia and Marika Krasina that is currently residing in Děčin (for more info see: www.aliensinstitution.com/cassette)

I discovered the trio of Still House Plants during the time I was living in Utrecht. It was raining for weeks and I was learning to ride a bicycle. Somehow, the environment of the city made me a bit dumb and bored and I started thinking in some sort of square-wave mode. So, I liked to listen to something that would make me a bit more emotional and would break this precise rhythm. The music of SHP seemed to be perfectly appropriate for that purpose.

One of my favourite labels—LOM, from Bratislava—recently released the debut record of Lithuanian composer and musician Jonas Jurkūnas. “Jonas imagines a dystopian future, long after the end of our time, where robots reinvent and reuse the leftovers of human musical heritage left in the remains (and their RAM). New robotic folk spontaneously emerges from the ruins, sung by synthetic indigenous programs that evoke the history of our music-making ancestors.“ (description of the album from LOM’s bandcamp)

I like to think of music in relation to specific places and sometimes it is other way round: a place makes me think of certain music. Traveling to Norway recently brought me back to Svobodová’s piece RORBU that she composed of the field recordings from “the very edge of the shore of the Norwegian island of Senja behind the polar circle.” A collage of “knitting machines from a string museum, the ship Polaris, a walk on the beach, howling wind, frozen rain, hail, creaking stairs, a recording of an old piano the journey’s composition” in combination with contact sound of artist’s self-made instruments gives me a possibility to travel far while sitting at my desk. (Citations from the webpage of radiocustica)

Link

This and other pieces from the self-titled album by Japanese project Non Band presents an eclectic mix of folk, punk and no wave motifs. I love no wave music, in general, but especially the many projects of female musicians that show the melodic and somehow gentler side of the movement.

Videos of Valek's lo-fi mechanical objects and instrument’s reviews and tutorials shot at his house and nature of north-western Moravia blew up the internet and developed a worldwide fan base for the artist during past few years (see the VAPE YouTube channel). Indeed, Válek is a unique figure in the context of the Czech experimental art scene, but also a person with a great sense of humour and an incredible creative capacity for manual labour. He doesn't see the need to travel far to play a concert. For him, it is enough to play concerts for his neighbours, who (fortunately, says Petr) have not yet noticed he's doing so. Not many people knew about Valek’s passion for Italo disco before Pink Album revealed it to the world. All its songs are improvised and enthusiastically sung in a language invented by the artist.

I like this song because I like to go and watch construction sites. Sometimes I prefer it to a gallery or a theatre visit.

“This song is called the Distant Land”, sings the girl at the beginning of the song. 231 was founded in 2012 by a family of architects – Konstantin Samolovov and Alexandra Samolovova. Together with their two daughters, they created lo-fi music, videos and drawings. The idea of the project was to consider a creation process equally to its outcome, emphasizing equality of all the participants regardless of their age and skills. The album \|​/​|​/​\\|​/​|​/​\ was produced as collaboration between 231 and Foresteppe, a talented musician Egor Klochikhin who was recording ambient albums in his room in Siberia at that time.
“In this album, two extreme conditions of home music merge into a bright soundscape, unpredictable and structurally precise at the same time, sometimes they conjure beautiful compositions or even songs, sometimes they scatter into the sounds and voices from the children’s room.” (description of the album at spina!rec’s bandcamp)

https://231happy.tumblr.com/
https://foresteppe.ru/

Viscous overtones produced by Fullman’s Long String Instruments and Wong’s fragmentary cello textures remind me of the performative side of the relationship between musicians and instruments behind compositions. I find it interesting to know the context around music, its technical aspect, actors involved in its creation (whether they are human or nonhuman). For me, knowing that may change an angle of perceiving the work.

Max Eilbacher is one of my favourite generative music producers. I love his solo project as well Horse Lords, the math rock band he plays in. Both are rich in polyrhythmic structures and diversity of sound. This album is a great example of interdisciplinary work on the intersection between music and mathematics.

Released on soundcloud under the name “user703918785” with tags #Louie Vuitton #wHotel.

I like shopping for groceries while listening to Ferraro’s music: choosing pasta, weighing mandarins and sticking labels on them, observing people choosing fish, kiwis rolling with a wine bottle on the conveyer belt. Vaporwave made me enjoy passing through shopping malls in the evening when the buildings get empty; to slow down in glittery places I usually try to avoid.

Cindy Lee is like frayed sequins with dried ladybug wing in between; like strings of a curtain that hang on the terrace of an abandoned house, made of plastic diamonds. "When people ask what kind of drag I do, I’m like, 60’s closet queen.” I love Patrick Flegel’s music since they played in the Canadian indie rock band Women. Cindy Lee is a different dimension of hypnagogic pop melodies with distorted stories about identity, love, trauma and “archetypes of gender”; honest and beautiful. (citations from https://www.chmafm.com/welcome/cindy-lees-confrontation-pop/)

Last year, I had time when I started to feel bored during many concerts I was visiting. Then, I was playing at one festival and heard Kurws playing live there. So, it made me feel happy.

More than a cool party mood, Brutalismus 3000 triggers in me a mood of bizarre performative situations such as driving on the Czech Highway in an old car stuffed with plastic fruit containers that are full of objects that don’t look cool. Many things and music can be considered in a different way than we expect. Empty plastic bottles can be used for building a fence, cassette tapes for a house, green rubber gloves for a foot of a crocodile, techno as background music in a dentist's cabinet.

“Ich glaube ich bin ein Telefon, romantisches kleines Telefon” (lyrics of the song)
Perhaps, in a few years our smart phones will be singing similar songs about how they imagine to be humans.

In this piece, Gruska takes us to a journey to “non-traditional, alien societies living mostly underwater”. Vidina is a perfect music for a pair dance, which shifting rhythms remind of listening sessions we used to have with my friends in Minsk. Back then, we were going to one lake located in the area of sleeping quarters to listen to frog raves (as we used to call chorus of frogs). Frog raves were among best sonic experiences that I had at those times.

It happened twice in my life that I shared my room with a piano, an instrument I did not use to play. The last one was so big that I always imagined it to be one of the first objects in the house around which the walls must have been built. And the first was a piano of my family that ended up in the room I spent most of my teenage years. When I visited my parents the last time, I was surprised to realize how small the room is and how strange that I never learned piano that was just near my bed. At least I was listening to Karavaichuk and enjoying the fact that he used to wear a pillowcase on his head during the concerts.

"I was sitting with some friends in Woodstock when a telephone call was forwarded to me from someone who claimed to be from NASA, and who wanted to use a piece of my music to contact extraterrestrial life”. (Laurie Spiegel’s citation from Pitchfork’s article: Resident Visitor: Laurie Spiegel's Machine Music).
Spiegel’s composition inspired by the work Harmonices Mundi of mathematician Johannes Kepler became part of the compilation for Voyager Golden Record – the first “time capsule” that travelled outside the solar system in order to potentially provide an overview of life on Earth. This fact makes me wonder about which kind of music humanity would want to show to the universe now.

Maria Komarova will perform her new work Krajïna in Brussels Saturday 29.04 as part of Q-O2’s annual festival Oscillation (April 27-30, 2023).

Full lineup and tickets here: www.oscillation-festival.be