WOGULOW
TAROUTZ VERMO - morok
(CD,
r.a.i.g.)
Bound in a very nice packaging design (a special bound
hardcover with relief printing and silvery applications on the back) comes
an improvisational / structured album by a Russian avantgarde
multi-instrumentalist Alexei Taroutz that convinces mainly by the courage
and disregard with which it mixes and opposes all kinds of things. Noise
expeditions ample side by side with loosely brushed post modern
experimentalism, a tiny glockenspiel braves into the equation and some time
after some electro-acoustic minimalism or minimalist electro-experimentalism
takes place. In a way it is a complete mess, yet it is beautiful in the same
way wandering through a deserted building site or a halfway developed and
then forgotten agrarian field is beautiful. You can sense the movement of
things falling apart but also there is the smell of something else,
something new coming up.
It is important to notice that the music of Taroutz,
though distorted, abstract and far away from regular, even avantgard music,
nevertheless never is obscure or weird. Sometimes it becomes outright
harmoniously beautiful, especialy for instance during the end of
“molfar”, the third track on “morok”, where an echoy guitar plays
two- and three-string chord in minor key, with a definite blue feeling. That
is somewhere after the trombone insert of Timur Shapirov has faded away. And
even though there are tape-time-effects inserted, they don’t sound
disturbing or destructive to the flow of the music. Even if the track ends
in a tape-wind-dynamic, it is a nice and easy thing to listen to. If you let
it, that is. Openness is a must. The music in itself is open. When he
strikes guitar chords in sync with drums beaten during the fifth track,
“omut”, the feeling is of an even extremer Codeine (and no singing).
Maybe the reason for this mellowness is that the album
was constructed and recorded from autumn and winter, a season that is
usually connected to melancholia, decay and introspection. And maybe that is
why the relief print on the cover of the album depicts the anatomy of the
inner part of the human ear, which points to the fact that listening aka the
decoding of soundwaves into audible signals and data is a very complex
process in the human head, ie. inner ear and brain. Both play an important
part in the decoding of the data and there are many effects and sideeffects
that may change the decoding of that data. And it also is a call to the
listener to become just this, a listener. One that meditates on his own
sensory shortcomings and tries to insulate the proper meaning of the music
in front of him. It is obvious that Taroutz wants more with his music than
just have people to listen to it. He wants them to react, maybe even if it
is only a meditation.
