Yarga Sound System: “Live”

Yarga Sound System are connected to Moscow’s superb Sketis label, which endeavors to gather and promote the most inventive combinations of folk tradition with today’s electronic music.  Sketis refers to itself as a “Russian world and roots” enterprise.  Yarga, working along similar lines, define their own output as “experimental-ambient-roots-folk.”

And that’s not the end of the complexity.

Given the chance to be a little more specific about ways in which old meets new, Yarga turn their four-part definition into a long list of rural, spiraling noises.  The narrow constraints of one style or one influence becomes a whole network of premodern, ecological interactions.

Yarga view themselves as the audible, organized embodiment of (deep breath…): “north noise forest word space fire place freedom air road water human being speech earth mama sky wind people way echo wave stone wood life happiness grief death sounds silence part fireplace boat knife…”

These are the sounds and presences that fill of the beautiful forested region of Karelia, lying between St. Petersburg and Finland.

Another overlap between label and artist lies in the explicit desire of Sketis is to harness the “materialized spirit and elemental word” of folk traditions from all around the erstwhile Soviet territories.  These stretch from northern forests to Central Asia – and then even further, all the way to Russia’s Pacific Coast.

Using traditional instruments like the gusli, above, Yarga attend to Sketis’ manifesto on their new live recording with numbers like “Grief.”

Once they’ve got all the nouns out of their system and consider a proper sentence or two, the band (above) have said – in no uncertain terms – that the foundation of their work will remain traditional songs of northern Russia.  With pleasing succinctness, then they explain that this folk material is filtered through dub, trip-hop, and other downtempo electronic styles according to a couple of basic principles.

The first of these is “archetype,” by which they mean the kind of respectful stance towards folk originals that we’d associate, for example, with roots music the world over.  That conservatism is certainly evident in tracks like “The Tatars”:

The second principle is “experiment,” i.e., the careful testing of how much these ancient forms can be subjected to “modern techniques and equipment.”  It’s this latter ambient or dance-oriented stage of development that they use for modern “self-expression.”

There’s something very Russian about this marriage of tradition and almost apologetic innovation.  For the second time in as many days, a Tarkovskii parallel seems useful. In his 1969 film, “Andrei Rublev,” two creative and equally old principles come together in music.

Rublev, as archetype, is bound very tightly indeed to the traditions of icon painting that at times seem almost inhumanly conservative.  Andrei has to be reminded that love, for mankind or God, “is long-suffering and charitable.  Is does not envy, nor does it sound loudly…”

In the later stages of the film Andrei encounters the emancipatory, but extremely risky spirit of experimentation: the son of a deceased bell-maker who lies to an entire community about inheriting his father’s skills.  Only by the grace of God does he get the long, expensive smelting and casting formulas correct.

The man and the boy go off together in the film’s final scene: “You can cast bells. I will paint icons.”  This is the same musical spirit than informs the most famous noises of the entire Karelia region, the church bells on the island of Kizhi.

Their musical, ecological interface of archetype and experiment have been audible on Kizhi since the 14th century.  That’s longer than most bands, it’s fair to say.

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