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:
Video: Staraya Derevnya – What I keep in my closet
