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"Germany and Russia haven't had a history of amicable relationships through the years. The twentieth century was a particularly bad time, as each took turns in occupying the other for extended periods. However, this hasn't stopped Russian musicians being welcomed when they've gone searching for greener pastures in the West as they look to make a living from their craft. Which explains how the Russian group Ersatzmusika comes to be based out of Berlin Germany and is about to release their second CD, Songs Unrecatable, on the German label Asphalt-Tango.
If you download one of the first things you'll notice is the lyrics are in English, and that's not because they've been translated, it's because almost all the songs on Songs Unrecantable are sung in that language. Although to be honest lead singer Doubrovskaja's accent is so thick that if you're only listening casually chances are you're going to assume she's singing in Russian. To be fair, it's not just her accent, the music the band plays is so different from what most of us are used to hearing when it comes to Eastern European folk, the combination of the two makes for a sound so alien to our ears you can be easily forgiven for not noticing she is singing in English.
Before anyone starts jumping to any conclusions about brooding Russians or anything equally stupid, by mood I'm referring to the fact that Doubrovskaja sounds likes a Russian accented Marlene Dietrich. Yet while both she and Dietrich evoke smoke filled cabarets with dim lights, musically, lyrically the two women are miles apart. For while the former's stock in trade was sultry love songs, the latter's lyrics drip irony onto music that tastes of a little bit of everything from Balkan beat box to traditional folk sounds. There's actually something eerily familiar about Ersatzmusika's overall sound that escaped me for the longest time, until it struck me how much they reminded me of The Doors in their slower and more pensive moments.
While they might share certain characteristics with other performers and have drawn upon various styles, it's doubtful you've ever heard anything quite like Ersatzmuzika before.
Where one has come to expect a lively sound inspired by polka's, the heady influence of gypsy violins, or other rural traditions, you find moody, atmospheric sounds which are a far more accurate reflection of life today. The lyrics in turn are a match for this sound as they offer commentary on humanity's checkered history and uncertain future.
The opening lines of "Gypsy Air", the first track on the CD, give you a good idea of the band's appraisal of our past: "Woe filled times we must abide / woe betide him who knows not this...Let us compile a list/Of the wrongs that man commits / Never shying ignominy / Clipped the wings, ducked the tail/Little boy, Nagasaki."
However it's not only the past they are concerned with as they capture the true price of the greed and materialism that plagues today a little later in the same song with the following lines, "That tenderness' needs must contrast / With tender, its negation."
I don't think I've heard a condemnation of a system that puts selling above caring phrased so succinctly and directly before. Now, lest you think they're only a one note band, they also show themselves capable of being darkly humorous. "Oh Pterodactyl", track seven, is a darkly delightful examination of our genealogy. "There has of late been much debate / Bout what is round and what is straight / And why no politician / Could have a forebear simian / But oh pterodactyl / To you we owe a / Oh pterodactyl / A debt of honour / Oh pterodactyl / Although that Noah / Oh pterodactyl / Wants to disown ya."
t's hard to describe the experience of listening to Songs Unrecantable by Ersatzmusika simply because there's not much else like them around to offer up as a comparison. Their accents mark them as Eastern European, and there are elements of their music that reflect that heritage, but not in the way we've grown accustomed to hearing them as presented by world music labels. This is an edgier, more contemporary, and urban sound which, while it doesn't discount its heritage, uses it as its springboard to something new instead of just recreating what's been done before. It's only fitting though considering their song's lyrics, which are not only predominately in English to allow for more universal comprehension, are also far more relevant to today's world than what we're used to.
Recently we've seen how young musicians from backgrounds as diverse as Balkan and Roma have begun to make their sound more contemporary while maintaining a connection to their traditional music. Ersatzmuzika is on the leading edge of the movement intent on proving anything old can be new again and in the process are creating some great music."
Richard Marcus
01. Songs on a Gypsy Air
02. Wild Grass
03. Train-slow Adagio
04. It's the Russian Beat
05. Berceuse
06. Tver (feat. Unterwasser)
07. Pterodactyl
08. HMS RIP DTs
09. Winter
10. Unredeemed
11. Letter from Baltimore (feat. Unterwasser)
12. Antediluvian
13. Incantation vs. Causation
Leonid Soybelman - guitar
Ruslan Kalugin - guitar
Phil Freeborn - guitar
Konstantin Orlov - bass
Michail Zhukov - drums, percussion
Irina Doubrovskja - vocals, accordion, piano, keyboards
Thomas Cooper - vocals
Link
pass: bluesmen-worldmusic.blogspot.com
These 6 Berlin-based musicians spent a large proportion of their lives in the USSR - that mythical and legendary place beyond the iron stage curtain where Gypsies sing of woollen boots, worshippers of Mammon decry broken hearts and glasses sing paeans to lost love. And where, what's more, the troubadour is an outlaw. Several band members have already caused a sensation in the Moscow underground scene. They immigrated to Berlin at the beginning of the nineties and have been enriching the Russian diaspora with various musical projects ever since. The multifaceted artist Irina Doubrovskaja founded ErsatzMusika in 2006, also writing the songs and lyrics for their debut album. Despite the remove from dub, urban folk, world, minimalism and balladeering at which ErsatzMusika stays, the group's music proves strangely familiar to audiences of these musical strains. Yet their music is not an eclectic lucky dip, but rather a collection of acoustic letters in a strange vernacular, a human-made-for-human ersatz for the sounds of information-age intercourse. It goes out with love...
"A very subtle yet striking album, wintry in colour yet warm and human in affection."
"Berlin based but Russian in soul, Ersatzmusika's Voice Letter is one of the most remarkable debut albums of recent years. The six piece band are fronted by Irina Dubrovskaja, a Ukrainian singer-composer-conceptual artist, and it is her warm, weary vocal that sets the tone for an album which reflects on life in the Soviet Union. Not that this is a nostalgia trip – anything but! – instead Ersatzmusika (named after the ersatz coffee they had to drink under communism) look at a fractured empire and its secret history: Considering they sing of the Gulags this is a history that Putin and co. are now trying to bury.
Ersatzmusika's distinctive, droning sound recalls Francoise Hardy’s finest 60s recordings. If Hardy had grown up on the Black Sea . . . The band operate on an off kilter tempo, often conjuring a Felliniesque fairground waltz tempo, never rushing songs, instead aiming for atmosphere while letting the lyrically beautiful songs drift past. Although all songs are sung in Russian the album’s sleeve carries translations of a few lyrics and as several appear to be adapted from poems they are quite mesmerizing.
Opening track, "Beside Myself To You I Came" finds Irina singing to friends who have left the former Soviet Union and resettled across the world (thus the Voice Letter of the album's title) while "Cranes" is based on a poem written by an anonymous Gulag prisoner who looks at the cranes flying past and attempts to send them mental messages.
Voice Letter is a very subtle yet striking album, wintry in colour yet warm and human in affection. It is also beautiful and haunting – and I don't speak a word of Russian."
01. Beside myself to you I came
02. He4y, Gngway!
03. The gold prospector
04. Still waters
05. Antediluvian
06. Bevelled glasses
07. And why
08. Cranes
09. Upon the earth
10. Tsaritsino station
11. The mushroom hunter
12. Eh, Kalina
13. Went and drank
14. How here's how
Irina Doubrovskaja - Keyboards, Accordion, Vocal
Leonid Soybelman - Guitar
Mikhail Zhukov - Percussion
Sergey Vorontsov - Bass, Guitar, Vocal
Igor Vdovchenko - Bass, Harmonica
Roman Bushuev - Drums
Link
pass: bluesmen-worldmusic.blogspot.com
