Unresolved tension is the interpretive fog that cannot be penetrated by even the most intent listener. Ambivalence is the stuff of which the thick impasto of Semikarakory is made.
Alexander Leonidovich Kaidanovsky (1946-95) is immediately recognized on the international scene as the smooth-pated, bold but wary guide who sherpas “the Journalist” and “the Professor” through the weirdly sentient Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky´s landmark movie Stalker (1979). The Soviet/Russian actor also featured in a number of foreign films, served on the jury at Cannes, and was a respected director, which the present reviewer reckons only the most dedicated cinephile outside of Iron Curtain Eastern Europe might readily know. Astrowind, Latvian sound designer Kirils Lomunovs (further a.k.a’d as Kriipis Tulo) already celebrated Kaidanovsky with an eponymous album. Semikarakory is something of a sequel, an homage to Kaidanovsky´s Zhena kerosinshchika (The Kerosene Seller´s Wife), a glasnost-era retelling of the Cain and Abel story set in the browns and grays of Stalinst deceit and dehumanization.
Sixty-four gripping minutes long, Semikarakory is submitted as a “mini-album,” odd for a story as engrossing as a Dovstoevsky novel. Astrowind characterizes his music making as “Paleopsychedelic ambient,” improvised live in the studio onto open-reel tape in his studio in Riga, largely on analogue synthesizers, and left untreated and unprocessed (Maksims Borisovs, a member until 2009, appears to have also contributed to the production).
Like many a Tarkovsky film, meaning and narrative is expressed tactilely. Lomunovs’ four extended pieces, ranging in length from nine and a half to twenty-one minutes, are besodden, ragged, caked with mud but also sprinkled with celestial dust and at times disarmingly melodic. Like a canvas by Mark Rothko, Semikarakory seems to belong to the realms of both above and below – which is not to say somewhere in between.
Building up from the chant of “We will go to Semikarakory!”, the title track is a trek begun. A crowd sets off to the swell of organ and strings, confronting a drear wilderness that Astrowind stretches out like an infinite steppe, which eventually peels off the face of the earth and into the stars.
The Zone is intimated by the ever-present drip of pooling water and slow, cautious pace, sojourners careful in the placement of the weight of each foot. Unresolved tension is the interpretive fog that cannot be penetrated by even the most intent listener. Ambivalence is the stuff of which the thick impasto of Semikarakory is made. Unlike the Stalker, Astrowind brings you to the head of the trail, but leaves you to find your own way. But the music somehow serves as a kind of protection spell.
Semikarakory is available on Frozen Light.
