KLUtCh: Music of International Intrigue!

KLUtCh, as we’ve reported before, is the nom de plume of St Petersburg musician and designer, Denis Popyrin.  The reason for returning to his excellent work is twofold:  the release of a new album and the appearance of his older material in a British documentary film, “Petroapocalypse Now.”

Popyrin’s brand-new instrumentals constitute the eagerly-awaited album “Bonus Life.”  To give you a quick idea of KLUtCh’s growing fan-base, he recently was praised in an interview with Boris Grebenshchikov.

A man who might rightly claim to be Russia’s most famous rock singer said:  “I like the Petersburg electronic outfit KLUtCh.  Unfortunately, there are very few Russian groups today whose work is physically or spiritually beneficial.  There’s too much ‘heartrending’ stuff out there that does nothing more than complain how everything’s bad or that life is simply awful…”

Considering, therefore, how KLUtCh’s music can be of direct philosophical benefit to us(!), we should explain how his complex instrumentals are being used by a British movie company.  The filmmakers describe their project, an investigation into the darker side of the oil trade, in these terms: “Over the last four years we have traveled around the world and talked to hundreds of people to try and find out why the price of oil is going up and up…”

“It is not that we are running out of oil.  The problem is the speed at which oil can be produced is slowing and some say that soon oil production will soon peak and then decline.  If this is true it could mean even higher oil prices and serious problems for the world economy.”

Representatives of the film company maintain they have access to “secret documents.”  “Further evidence that the world does not have as much oil previously thought appeared in January 2006 when
secret documents, from inside the Kuwait Oil Company, were released to the industry journal Petroleum Intelligence Weekly – which appeared to show Kuwait has less than half the oil it says it has.”

In other words, this is a story of unknown, if not deliberately hidden interconnections between various aspects of the fiscal and political universe.  It’s the tale of a falsified network.

These unraveled linkages, connections, or consequences are a most suitable backdrop for KLUtCh’s work.  The ornate patterns and increasingly layered, even baroque loops of Popyrin’s “chip/tracker tunes, jungle, and new-age electronica” are often discussed by the man himself in similar terms of dauntingly tricky networks.

“Music is based upon waves.  In fact man per se, both in his essence and generalized existence, is based upon all kinds of wave patterns.  The whole world consists of them, and that’s all entirely logical.  Waves of differing lengths, different ranges, and so forth.  And, if that’s indeed the case, then they can be digitized, too.  Sampled.  Tagged.  Looped.  I always like to understand the sequences or interrelationships of a signal that’s been broken into parts: it’s like a puzzle, some kind of enormous dilemma.”

He then maintains that these same patterns can not only capture the true complexity of existence, but might also – through a reverse process – influence it.  Music can express and improve the way that we interact with our surroundings: it’s an ideal social tool, as an art form produced with people and for people.  “Music can act upon our reflexes.  We can program somebody’s consciousness or change it, even [using sound].  In order to do so, you need to have already-prepared material at hand, preserved in some form or other.”

In other words, digitized building blocks.

“Linking one sound with another is like scribing a hieroglyph.  It’s the image or figure of a letter, together with its meaning, too.  All in one, just like a sample…. To be brief, it’s pretty much as I just said.  Everything is changing before our eyes.” He pauses for a second and then adds, with a wink:  “There you go; it already has!”

These conversations start to draw similar, looping sequences of increasing difficulty and abstraction.  Hence the kinetic images in this post, used by Popyrin to express his musical outlook or intent in some visual, yet verbally inexpressible form.

After these admissions, one can certainly understand why the film crew of “Petroapocalypse Now” would choose Popyrin’s ever-changing, hieroglyphic ditties.  When placed beside a movie screen, they orchestrate a grim narrative of secret, manipulated, and misused interrelationships – with the documentary images you see above.

As we see below, keeping a handle on the chaotic, dovetailed networks of universal or globalized interaction, however, is bound to give you a headache.  It’s a state better suited to sound than to boardroom banter.

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