Maria Grigoryeva: The Music of Ellipses

To say that Russian electronica is a male-dominated field would be an understatement – and nowhere more so than in the realm of solo performers. New work by female experimenters, therefore, attracts special attention. This week, in a rare and corrective spirit, St Petersburg’s Maria Grigoryeva has released an instrumental EP entitled “Transfer to Unknown.” It can be downloaded, together with accompanying artwork, from here.

Grigoryeva, born in 1986 and classically trained, now works in broader and less traditional domains as she experiments with local DJs, dancers, and video artists. In her attempts to find a common modus operandi among all these endeavors, she offers the following statement of purpose. (We’ve altered her English a little.) “Through my music I’d like to reveal those aspects of our existence which are not accessible through everyday experience, by which I mean the gentle, delicate sounds that fall to Earth like heavenly good fortune.  They’re the kind of sounds that can appeal not only to the ear, but to the heart, also. ”

Grigoryeva, as already hinted, has reached this level of compositional and philosophical abstraction only after passing through a solid academic course of study.  She studied both the violin and composition in the city’s State Music Conservatory, after which she won several international competitions, both at home and abroad (Finland).  She has performed even further afield, in Norway, Sweden, Holland,  Austria, and Germany.

This broad range of experience at a relatively young age has now led to the foundation of a “Mini-Orchestra,” whose four members can be seen below.  It was assembled with the primary purpose of performing Grigoryeva’s own works (which include a ballet) and has already blessed a significant number of festivals around Russia.

The manifesto of the Mini-Orchestra states: “This is a concert agency with enormous resources of its own that include classical, modern academic, and electronic music.  These artistic directions are also synthesized with dance, video, media design, and other creative trajectories. The orchestra’s basic goal is to bring important tendencies in European music to the concert halls of Russia. We also aim, conversely, to take own our work to Western festivals and competitions.”

And that brings us to the new EP. Together with the music itself and monochrome artwork, it has been hosted with a small, abstract text. Here we translate from the Russian, rather than rely upon the English version (which is somewhat hard to understand). Grigoryeva sets the tone for the sounds embedded in this post as follows, showing a marked preference for ellipses and lower-case lettering, which together create a visual counterpart to her evocation of life’s passages or “transfers.”

“…The final point of destination is unknown. Over the course of this transfer, you’ll cover thousands of kilometers and many roads… You’ll pass through thousands of corridors, formed by your thoughts and ideas… most of them will be lost en route… yet some will stay with you for the rest of your life… life itself is a form of transfer… from one point to another… from one state to another… all colored by some fixed notions… sometimes the passage will tire you out… and you’ll stop for a while… but suddenly, out of nowhere, some new ideas will emerge and take you further…  causing the transfers to start anew.”

“Life is a train… in which you travel alone… without railway staff… you alone are the engineer.. and your internal voice will announce the stops en route… the passage taken is deeply intuitive… a wandering across space… a spiritual wandering… you travel from one idea to another… in search of harmony… it continues until the moment you realize that harmony resides in the process itself, irrespective of its complexity or simplicity…”

“Your transfers through life’s conditions are the harmony that you seek, day after day… but in order to understand that, you must first pass through years of searching for some kind of end-point… behind which is hidden nothing more than a basic and temporary mystery…”

“With calm and peaceful eyes you look upon that mystery… and it forces you to move further still…”

This attitude is something we’ve seen in a number of Russian genres, especially in the nationally popular, yet woefully unfashionable Russian “chanson,” in which musically challenged, brow-beaten middle-aged men grumble about the unfairness of life, especially if they’ve endured some kind of “transfer” through the penal system. The consolation of those songs is that – despite their overriding misery – they sing in a Romany fashion of movement (and therefore hope), come what may.

A gypsy-like protagonist wanders, year after year, a movement that’s inherently sad, being devoid of a calm resting place, yet it simultaneously and succesfully defeats the likelihood of any conclusion. Of a swift and brutal end. If, in other words, things “must” end in misery, sooner or later, then each and every day of wandering or “transferring” carries with it a melancholy sense of gratitude, too.

One of the logos used for the Mini-Orchestra embodies this notion rather well, giving visible form to the importance of motion in multiple, shifting directions, rather than the linear goal that traditional composition (and sheet music) might suggest. It’s a validation of enduring sounds over goal-driven structures.

These same ideas color the sounds of Grigoryeva’s EP, fading in and out like her ellipses or looping insistently as the wheels of her locomotive. The entire recording is as quiet as her modest, lower-case typography; the perfect counterpart to her “mini” endeavors. It’s the soundtrack to a tiny, stubborn presence, somewhere on the edge of the landscape that continues to move, come what may.

To keep making transfers.  And searching…

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