Effect Doplera: Turning the Clock Back and Thinking Forward

A couple of initial notes: although it probably comes as no surprise to learn that the name of this St Petersburg outfit translates as “Doppler Effect,” it should be pointed out that hunting down the band’s material might be tricky, due – ironically – to a problem caused by that same familiarity. As is immediately obvious, the last name of physicist Christian Doppler is spelled slightly differently in Russian; the first word of the band’s Russian-language moniker would – if properly transliterated – be written “effekt.” In other words, what we have here is the Russian spelling – using Latin characters…

A little wasted time with a search engine might result, so be warned. Bad moods may ensue.

A few high-school physics lessons, taken years ago, might be enough to remind us that the “Doppler Effect” refers to ways in which wave frequency changes relative to a listener’s movement closer to (or further from) that wave’s source. Almost every textbook will use the example of a passing car and the fact that the noise of its engine will seemingly change as we drive closer – or further away. In essence, therefore, what we have is a metaphor of relativity: the type or nature of information changes, depending on where/how you, the listener, happen to be traveling.

That implied significance of the ensemble’s stage name has a pleasing and additional usage when we consider how these musicians operate on a day to day basis. Even in uncomfortable clothes.

They describe themselves in the following manner: “Effect Doplera is a collective of musicians who got sick and tired of the sameness and uniformity that defines most music styles or fashions today. We, the members of Effect Doplera, play a DIFFERENT kind of music. It lies at the interface of the industry’s ultra-modern and classical vectors.” Already we sense that our central metaphor is being put to good use; contemporary music goes through its motions, but its significance (the realization of its potential meanings) depends upon your activity.

As we soon learn, these new opportunities for a passage through “different” aspects of music will come from a development of visual possibilities.

“Effect Doplera is a multimedia project. In order to realize its artistic goals, it has created a unified media space by combining both intellectual and emotional significances, residing in aural and visual forms. In other words, Effect Doplera is made from a combination of both music and the visual arts. The ensemble was formed in 2007 from the members of several other, very distinct projects.” Yet again the importance of an aesthetic and philosophical trajectory comes to the fore, in the realization of some “goal” or other.

The inspiration for this ever-mobile outlook comes in part from a few Western sources. “We may like listening to [fixed genres, such as] punk rock from time to time, but how can anybody really play music like that today if you have any sympathy for projects such as Ninja Tune, Warp, or 4AD! After we went [not long ago] to concerts by Bonobo, Cinematic Orchestra, and Red Snapper, it became clear that we, too, could do something similar in a live format.”

Live shows, first and foremost, add a visual aspect, either as video art or the simple presentation of oneself to an audience. It all helps to reel in the listeners.

The individuals involved in this dual effort are Anna Kordubailo (vocals), Oleg Mikhailov (horns, programming, and IDEAOLOGY [sic]), Roman Bogun (programming, IDEAOLOGY), Slava Stokratskii (drums), Pavel Lazurin (guitars), Tat’iana Volgina (video art), and Nikolai Bichan (producer). The last two individuals in this list are unusual inclusions, but they speak directly the band’s desire to underscore the visual, theatrical aspects of their work: their role, in other words, as showmen.

In many ways this same desire harks directly back to Russian musical traditions across the entire 20th century. The established, if not conservative term for a lot of what popular music does in Russia is “estrada,” which literally translates as “the small stage” – plus all that happens upon it. This means that for Slavic music fans, song has – for decades – been wrapped up with simultaneous reference to comedy, puppetry, circus arts, and so forth.

In fact, after Stalin’s death – when stagy jollity became an option for performers, the long-lived traditions of today’s so-called “theatricalization” began, as singers started to move (more) around the stage, change costumes, and create small visual scenarios for musical numbers, depending upon their lyrical or “civic” content. Music, in a word, was shown. Effect Doplera hold to the same beliefs today, thus flying in the face, for example, of Western post-punk traditions, according to which almost anybody wearing a costume is laughed from the premises…

Especially if they intend playing keyboards with a log.

In the rain.

One recent comment on line from a concertgoer noted how this visual “trajectory” moves out into the audience. “Effect Doplera play nice music in a kind of lounge/trip-hoppy vein. At the start of their recent gig, the audience just listened to the music… but then they started to dance. A real disco got going The band played all the way through its set and started getting ready to leave, but they couldn’t! The audience was making loads of noise, jumping up and down, and shouting for the musicians to stay on stage. ‘Live’ music is live music… no matter where you are!”

It doesn’t matter, in other words, whether we’re inside the theater or out on the street; by dragging all manner of visual clues into the performance – and then removing the line between proscenium and parterre – Effect Doplera hope to turn their shows into the enactment of a worldview.

And that same worldview doesn’t involve saying very much. The band has recently set up an account on Twitter – the home of aimless chitchat. So far they have managed a grand total of three entries… The first celebrates the creation of the account[!]; the other two announce a couple of shows. Over the course of more than a month, our musicians cannot muster more than a handful of words. Nor, it seems, would they want to. They direct our attention elsewhere.

On their page at Vkontakte, they ask that fans of the music “give special thanks to our brilliant art director [shown above in wistful pose and mentioned in the list of performers]. Say thanks to Tat’iana Volgina (aka ‘Buzillo’) – for her visualization of our thoughts, emotions, and ‘heartfelt concepts’ on the theme of Effect Doplera!”

If we go looking for Buzillo’s own portfolios, we find an extension of her fin de siècle aesthetic (shown in our retro images), recalling the early days of cinema when street and stage performances went head to head with the early heroes of a silent, mobile art form. Sound and image battled for supremacy in the hearts of the audience.

The same battle is evident in a sarcastic comment left by this designer on one of her profiles today. It refers to the biggest, loudest exponent of a visualized or “theatricalized” tradition in Russia, Filipp Kirkorov. This is the tall, barrel-chested, Bulgarian exponent of “showmanship” whose glossy extravaganzas became the epitome of Russia’s moneyed ‘90s. Now, as we know, things are a little different on the financial markets, and forms of display have become more modest as a result.

Heads are hung in despair.

Buzillo’s snide aside comes in a mock admission that “My hero is Filipp Kirkorov. You’ve got to be pretty damn smart to get where he has – somewhere he really shouldn’t be, considering his complete lack of everything an artist needs.” And so Buzillo goes to work with the retro images in this post, turning back the clock on Russia’s performance traditions in order to get the audience moving along a different trajectory, one that’ll allow them – through music – to also look at the world in a different way. In short, she’s creating a multimedia Doppler Effect – no matter how it’s spelled, since words are already falling away – on underused Twitter accounts – in favor of visible action.

In another section of her online profile, she fills out the box marked as “Who I’d Like to Meet” by turning that imagined individual into a personified idea. She states not whom she’d liked to encounter, but what: “The meaning of life and knowledge of how the universe is put together.” The clothes shown in our photographs are, apparently, what you need before researching that meaning.

Philosophers, get ready to go shopping for a thinking cap.

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