Staraya Derevnya

Old Village [rus.]



I've always had a bit of a fascination with Russia. This goes back to around 1993 when I was watching "Wings of the Red Star" in the days when the Discovery Channel was about actually discovering things rather than home-decorating makeovers or high definition blue whales or whatever it is they're doing now. You'd think that the curious history of the MiG-25 or the privilege of walking aboard a Volga-Dnieper Antonov An-124 as a kid would've been enough to spark my interest in the language as well. No such luck: As soon as I hit that Cyrillic alphabet, it was like a brick wall.

And so Russia remains a fascinatingly distant place and paradox, European and Asian and backward and modern and wayward all the same. As the saga with Putin unfolds in the pages of the New York Times Magazine once every two years, its musicians carry on in the Moscow underworld and in the exiled streets abroad. But what do we really know of contemporary Russian music? Most people hear that and think Shostakovitch or Prokofiev if they think anything at all. At worst, they think Gogol Bordello. Yikes.

Maybe Staraya Derevnya isn't at the root of what's happening. Maybe they're totally irrelevant, but I'd like to believe they're not. I'd like to believe that slightly demented piano lines and click-clack bongo percussion and earnest, lo-fi vocals and recordings still have their roots in trad-Russian folk ballads of the peasants that still inhabit the Urals despite the strife and the rush for modernity and the oligarchs and the oil. Their name is Russian, they sing in Russian, it feels like they're singing to Russians... But alas, it is London and Haifa that they call home.

I'd love to be able to point these guys out to you in public. I'd love to tell you their names. But their website and MySpace account (much like their ethos and delivery) are both impenetrable, utterly Russian. What I can discern: They have been around since at least 1999's Expeditions, have a few songs that haven't made it to a record yet, and finished recording this EP in February. They call it acoustic post-punk, and in the first track "Maldives" you can hear that in the scratchy vocals and heavy strumming of the guitars. But "Traces" has to best both the opening cut and the second song, "Offering," with its homemade hissing and four-track charm. It's a beautiful song really, and though Russian is often criticized (like all the Slavic languages) for not sounding "pretty" enough in itself, the two gentlemen I believe to be running this show prove otherwise. The photos of the band on their MySpace page are the same, a visual dichotomy of the music this band offers as a taste of old-world singalongs on the Black Sea clashing with the freak-folk guardians of the new age. It may not be the sound of Russia, but it's a lot closer than gypsy-punk. Spread the word.

Patrick Masterson

Music Director and DJ at WUSC-FM Columbia, Free-Format Educational Radio
http://audiversity.com/2007/04/new-music-staraya-derevnya-kenna.html




Style: psychodelic rock, post-punk

Formed in Haifa in 1994

Gosha Hnyu - voice, percussion

Igor Kungurov - guitar

Paul Tarell - piano, bass

Timurti - hang, fleutes

Yura Stolov - guitar, bass
- songs



Discography:

2008 "I am thicket"

2007 Onelegged"

1999 "Expedition"

1997 "Early recordings 1995-1996"