Staraya Derevnya
Boulder Blues
Ramble Records
2022
British-Israeli collective Staraya Derevnya’s “Boulder Blues” revolves around the twenty-plus minute opus Bubbling Pelt, which sounds like Comus and Faust fighting over a rare cache of Japanese psychedelic rock. An unnerving, brilliant album.
In the early part of this century, the free folk and freak folk scenes coalesced into something that didn’t seem out of place on the bigger, trendier indie labels, something palatable and perhaps even marketable. With the rise of New Weird America and its worldwide offshoots, the genuinely new and genuinely weird music was ironically sidelined, pushed back to where it began: firmly underground. Lysergic folk laced with kosmische rhythms, framed with jagged experimental edges or pillowed deep in drone got its airtime through media and venues usually more concerned with modern composition, sound art and musique concrete – in the UK, this usually meant The Wire magazine and London’s Cafe Oto – rather than the usual folk outlets. Perhaps, as a result, the musicians involved seemed to move further into experimental territory, and the corresponding scene became more and more fertile even as it explored the most distant reaches of what can conceivably be called folk music.
British-Israeli collective Staraya Derevnya feel like the logical conclusion of these urges. Eight releases into their twenty-year career, and they are weirder and more thoroughly uncompromising than ever. Boulder Blues revolves around the twenty-plus minute opus Bubbling Pelt, which sounds like Comus and Faust fighting over a rare cache of Japanese psychedelic rock. An earthy pulse of bass and percussion. Here and there are quacks of kazoo. And the strange, strangled challenge of the vocals: animal stutters and confused growls, which at times seem to merge with the bass clarinet and double bass. The band’s leader and vocalist Gosha Hniu (who, in a nod to Ingmar Bergman, describes his practice as ‘cries and whispers’) takes all of his lyrics, minimal and mangled as they are, from the poems of Russian artist Arthur Molev. In Bubbling Pelt, a single phrase is rendered bestial by repetition, distortion and decay.
The opening track, Scythian Nest, is more conventionally structured, but that’s where any semblance of normality ends. Hniu’s squeals are augmented by popping, squelching synths, and the whole thing, overwrought but somehow under control, teeters on the edge of madness. The title track is an exercise in repetition and variation: a two-word Russian phrase (which translates to ‘stone of sound’) is repeated for eight minutes, resulting in an almost dissociative eeriness.
Tangled Hands is – loosely speaking – a duet, with Galya Chikiss on vocal duties. But more than anything, it sounds like a witch conversing with her familiar or the sound of an ancient, creaking landscape approximating human communication.
There is forest and steppe, stone and water in all of these songs, and in the closer Gallant Spider, there is also something of the minutiae of invertebrate life, busy, brisk and – compared with what has come before – cacophonous. Some of the track’s percussion comes courtesy of flautist Maya Pik’s children playing around with a drum machine, a happy accident that feels both right and strange, much like the whole of this unnerving, brilliant album.
Boulder Blues is out now.
Order via Bandcamp: https://starayaderevnya.bandcamp.com/