Lithuanian Hip-Hop and Downtempo as Forms of Passive Revolt

A couple of hip-hop and downtempo netlabels overlapped this week in an interesting way, one from the Baltic and the other being a joint venture from a number of Russian/Ukrainian cities. The former is Monday Jazz; the latter is Drugoi Hip-Hop (”Different Hip-Hop”). They dovetailed briefly because both these projects publish first-rate podcasts. Typically the downloadable shows are dedicated to jazzy or hip-hop mixes of various chill-out tracks; this week, one of the founders of Drugoi Hip-Hop, Roman Vorkuta, produced a 78-minute broadcast that was commissioned by Monday Jazz, but published at his own portal, too. That duplication gives us cause to a say a word about both ventures.

Monday Jazz, although based in Lithuania, pays much attention to DJs and studio whiz-kids from other places around the globe. The philosophy behind these varied locations, compositions, and artists is expressed as follows (we’ve altered the English, to make things a little clearer). “MONDAY JAZZ is an open society of DJs, producers, music lovers, visual artists, thinkers, and party-goers. They all share familiar attitudes towards life; they agree on what makes life worthwhile – and on what constitutes evil.” Suddenly we switch to the first person plural – and a definition of what’s wrong with the world. Here, in other words, is both a sketch of life’s failings – and a theory concerning how music might help.

As the image below suggests, this theory will be impressionistic, rather than scientific.

“We oppose the kind of evil that comes from TV – or other media – in the form of corrupted politicians, fake celebrities and soul-destroying entertainment.
We’re against the idea that a private apartment should be your life’s only goal. After all, in order to reach that goal, you’d be working for the bank ’til the end of your days.” If this reminds us of the opening lines to Irvine Welsh’s novel “Trainspotting,” we would not be mistaken, since that same film will reappear in a few minutes, when talk turns to the Russian portal. Slowly we are unwrapping a worldview of retreat from mercantile norms: “Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a f***ing big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home.”

And tie yourself to a bank…

…or an IPod. Monday Jazz have a proposal. “Our idea is to create an alternative space for all of us who share these feelings & thoughts. We’re talking about shared attitudes towards music, movies, and [artistic] events – the kind of things that’ll introduce you new, mentally challenging ideas.” In order to keep those challenges coming – and keep nasty mercantilism at bay – the website MondayJazz.com publishes the aforementioned podcasts once a week. It probably will come as no surprise to learn that these audio broadcasts appear on Mondays, too.

Why Mondays? Because these are “the roughest days for the working class” – slaving away in order to pay off the mortgage they regret having signed. This is music designed to tune out from social stresses; it is the soundtrack to a revolutionary rejection, even, of big televisions, washing machines, and unreliable cars. One of the most recent examples of what that rejection sounds like came, as mentioned, from the Drugoi Hip-Hop portal based in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Odessa. The people at Monday Jazz asked a young man by the name of Roman Vorkuta to “introduce us to the unseen side of Russian instrumental hip-hop.”

The tracklist for the mix looks like this: Propazha, “Big Brush for Ur Fan-zy”; RZhB, “Tsarapat’sia”; 813, “Dym byl na kryshe v tot moment”; DZHAzovyi, “Letaiushchii beg”; Poluraspad , “Retro”; Reims, “Gud lov”, Stak, “Words of Melodies”; Little Nastya, “AnyManyHoney”, Nemcbeats, “Summersong”; Nienvox, ” The River Express”; Aleksandr Udutyi, “Kreona”; One, “Need”; Screen, “Instrumental Present to Big Black Boots”; Urban District Nine, “Aquamarine”; Roma Chudo, “Long Cosmic Journey with Plush Dog”; Carmacat, “Dreaming of Paris”; Garimastah, “Fantastik”; Easy, “I-22″; Deech, “Istochnik”; DJ Soulviet, “Laskovaya”; Day2k, “The Glitchplanes”; Photoindustries, “My Opinion”; Sipps, “Bukharest”; Stupor, “Welcome to Montana”; Ennius, “Foto”; PTF, “Mutki”;  Cerguni, “Triniti”; Park Sashi Filippova, “V pogone za solntsem”…

A long list of names, all shrouded in mystery.

These are peripheral, independent figures from Estonia, Kazakhstan and what Monday Jazz calls “Russia’s farthest corners.”They include a fair number of artists, label owners, and so forth, leading to the general invitation from Lithuania that we “check them out further.” (All of them…!)

They merge in a mix that Vorkuta has called “Kandinsky Repercussion.”  We’re informed that that the resulting podcast “twists around instrumental hip-hop, leaning on occasion towards other related styles. There are plenty of deep or glitchy beats, jazzy or electronic motifs, samples taken from movies, meditative rhythms – and esoteric sounds, too.” If we then look deep into the Drugoi Hip-Hop portal, we can find an admission from Vorkuta himself that “the process of making the mix took a pretty long time… But, at the end of the day, I’d say that it all worked out well. (To be honest, we wouldn’t have things any other way!) Thanks to everybody who took part!”

This synergy between Vorkuta’s web-project and the Lithuanian site was logical enough, given that the former outlines its manifesto in ways similar to our Baltic music lovers.”By ‘different’ hip-hop, we do not mean the things you’ll hear on TV or in the mainstream media… Our music comes not from well-known artists, but instead from people who are actually more professional – and more impressive, too. It can be abstract, indie, or underground material… but we’re not necessarily limited by those genres alone.”

The site showcasing these experiments also makes direct reference to our Scottish heroin addicts.

A purported need to outpace generic limits, no doubt, is what produces the reference to Kandinsky (1866-1944), a Russian abstract painter who constantly compared his works to musical compositions. We include two of his most famous paintings here, canvases that the artist even said were “taught” to him by the structures of melody and harmony. These images, therefore, are what Vorkuta imagines this mix to look like. With their chromatic and structural wizardry, they “twist and turn” in order to escape the conventional, but why the name Vorkuta? It’s highly unlikely to be this young man’s actual surname.

Vorkuta is a city just inside the Arctic Circle; all the outdoor photographs in the post were taken on its streets and half-abandoned work sites. Its name is synonymous with Soviet labor camps and – perhaps most infamously – with an uprising at one such camp a few months after Stalin died in 1953. Many camp inmates went on strike and took the “anti-establishment,” if not profoundly revolutionary stance of doing nothing. As tensions grew, the tragically inevitable conclusion grew closer.

Ultimately 66 men – according to Solzhenitsyn’s numbers – were murdered by the authorities.

In any case, this place has been invoked – in dramatic terms, decade after decade – as the embodiment of protest. Just as Welsh’s novel inspires a Lithuanian downtempo and jazz portal to create chill-out mixes in a land frantic with materialist zeal, so our Russian DJ turns to a similar (though infinitely worse) form of “opting out” for his stage name. Leaning on Kandinsky’s paintings, even for his artwork, Vortuka advocates aimless complexity in a land where washing machines, cars, and “private apartments” have come to represent simple, straightforward, and even “laudable” normalcy.

Download this mix – and do nothing whatsoever. Lithuanians and Arctic miners will thank you.

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