Modest Minimalism: Electronicmicroanimal, D. Mantsevitch, and Enko

Three new electronic releases from independent Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian sources this week have – unbeknown to one another – voiced similar themes of what we might call minorization. The first comes from a southern city on the banks of the river Volga, Astrakhan. This is the birthplace of Nikita Eremin, who has recently relocated to St Petersburg. Eremin has been playing – or, in his words, merely “experimenting” – with music since 2003, walking slowly away from his roots in funk and hip-hop. Now his goals are somewhat more complex and generically less traditional: “Seeking a purity of sound in each and every one of my samples, I really started looking into ways that my electronic apparatus could generate both glitch-noise and melodies.”

The verb, in fact, that he uses for “looking into” that musical/abstract sphere also has a secondary meaning in Russian of “delving deeply” – or “submerging oneself,” even. This sense of increasing submersion increases elsewhere.

Motion and fluidity will soon manifest themselves in the strangest places.

This growing distance from stylistic, generic, and even spatial limitations can be documented with some accuracy. Eremin felt confident enough in 2007 to start committing experimental material to tape; this coincided with his interest in shamanism and “questions of how energy is dispersed across the planet.” As we can see in the image below, Eremin has dedicated serious effort not only to the study of these ancient beliefs, but also to their practice. “Shamanism has gradually forced me to start looking at my musical work in totally new ways. It has made me redefine the concepts that underscore both the melodies I’ve been writing, and my rhythmic patterns, too.”

His most recent investigations in these unspoken, yet ubiquitous patterns of influence now involve what he calls “synchronous and logarithmic sounds derived from lighting apparatus.” These would be the sounds, in other words, of radiant, ambient states. Such investigative work does not seem to be bringing much happiness, however. At another small, well-hidden venue online, we hear that Eremin’s attempts to make sense of the world’s “mischief and absurdity” have only led to a “creative eclipse and personal problems.”

As a result, his music composition came recently to a halt; a writer’s block caused by some rather grand, existential issues. This temporary dead-end, perhaps, finds expression in the new EP’s title, “1plus1equ1“. That muddled designation gives awkward voice to an equally troublesome process of addition; it expresses a series of added units that, unfortunately, lead neither to progress, nor to any meaningful accrual.

More work for no extra gain; frantic effort – but no forward movement.

In the same spirit, Eremin gives the five new tracks, lasting a total of 26 minutes, names/titles that also fade in and out of logic. Digits are interspersed with letters (”6ruy6″), and vowels fall out of place (”Mlnholic_Faddd”), only occasionally touching upon anything that resembles a concrete reference. Most meaningful of all these allusions is a relatively transparent nod in the direction of a well-known oceanic metaphor. Eremin titles one of the tracks “Ruuoossallochcka_Gazzneeyt..,” which – with many more vowels than needed! – seems a drawn-out, plaintive version of the Russian phrase “A Mermaid Is Passing Away.”

That title would appear to have the following significance, given the general context that we are slowly mapping out. The more Eremin’s investigation “delves” or “submerges itself” in glitch, patterns of light, and/or shamanism, the greater the sense of absurdity, randomness, and one’s loss in a sea-like state. In the fairytale “Rusalochka,” in fact, a mermaid commits suicide in the bottomless, stormy sea, all in the name of love. Investigating one – potentially happy – sense of (amorous) “transferal” or sacrifice, she tragically enacts another, much sadder equivalent. Eremin’s experiments into the atmospheric, if not “cosmic” washes of ambient sound, it seems, will be a similarly humbling, if not saddening process. They reach these melancholy conclusions by uniting technical, minimal, and profoundly human elements as an “electronicmicroanimal.”

Moving to the Belarusian capital of Minsk, we see that a new EP has popped up from Denis (aka “Dzenis”) Mantsevich (b.1988). A young musician whose own efforts have been preserved in recorded forms since 2003, Mantsevich evinces stylistic preferences that are a little more structured than those of Electronicmicroanimal; he usually works in the gray area between ambient and downtempo or deep techno, to the degree that some of his instrumentals can be found on a large Russian dance portal. All of these sonic sketches have been directly inspired by nature and the Belarusian/Russian landscape, more specifically its open, “oceanic” expanses.

The new EP is called “Degree of Latitude” and composed of three minimalist/dub techno tracks: “Steppe,” “Siberia,” and “Taiga.” This is, in other words, an EP named in honor of (potentially) mappable space – that offers no more than three inexact, vague definitions of ineffably grand domains. Hence, no doubt, the dub elements of the techno. The only way in which concrete, punctuated units of sound can hope to do justice to the massive realms they evoke is to fade away. By enacting their own demise – like Rusalochka – they show the grand, if not boundless dimensions of the “absurd” world around them. Efforts at description can only “triumph” through the processes of loss.

No wonder Eremin got depressed; Mantsevich tries peeking at the same humbling issues.

Mantsevich also says that he tries to “reach harmony in his thoughts and ideas, a sense of both serenity and balance.” That would suggest that an equal opportunity or chance exists for the same serenity and balance to be lost, and indeed – if we travel all the way south to the Ukrainian town of Sumy, we do indeed find some proof thereof.

A third young Slav, Enko (known to friends as Artem), has just published his own new mini-disc with the title of “Vshiva.”  That neologism contains both echoes of Hindu deities and the Russian word that means “lice-infested.”  The high and the low (the bold and the timid) come together in one place, for reasons that we previously attributed, as with Mantsevich, to aspects of landscape and location. In WWII Sumy was pounded by German forces and consequently has a rather peculiar architectural appearance today, a combination of older buildings that survived the bombing – shown below – and large tracts of Soviet apartments, built on the rubble of the twentieth century. In terms of geography, imagery, and history, therefore, Sumy is a peripheral location, balanced between opposing states, in several senses.

And so to the new EP. No sooner has Enko given us the title track, with its hopes of some salvationary potential, than the second number, “Poop,” drags us back down to earth (and further) in no uncertain way. Enko, in fact, has something of a penchant for – extremely – unpleasant artwork, and once again with this release, his images – as below – show little faith in an ability to create utterances imbued with any elegance or eloquence. The third and final instrumental drives this point home. Called, quite simply, “Minimalist,” it uses the one word of its title, repeated over and over, in order to make some kind of lasting statement. The same four-syllable noun, however, grows both slower and increasingly slurred. It dissolves into the white, ambient wash from which it arose.

The percussion grows in volume, bordering by the end of the track on a small-scale idm/breakcore rumble of noise, but the word “minimalist” is now almost inaudible. The narrator is, it would seem, spewing garbage.

As “Vshiva” ends, we hear the title said one last time against a silent backdrop. It sounds – quite literally – mechanical. Having made nothing more than a few humble percussive gestures, it has been reduced even more in scale – precisely because of its feeble efforts to map out “something” against a formless, “oceanic” swathe of ambient/drone. In structurally similar ways to our mermaid, though without any sense of beauty or self-satisfaction, Eremin, Mantsevitch, and Enko are all humbled by the musical or rhythmic enterprises they have undertaken.

Inspired and saddened by the endless landscapes around them, these three young men keep twiddling, tweaking, and mapping a diminutive, barely audible space – even if they know it will merely exacerbate their sense of smallness. It will underscore, time and time again, the three elements of Eremin’s moniker: the electronic, the “animal” or human, and the increasingly dramatic micro-dimensions of all they do.

In a land this big, sounds fade very quickly indeed.

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