Zvuki Mu

One Response to Zvuki Mu

1. WorldWideWeber says:

   February 9, 2006 at 12:08 pm

   As promised, the review of a recent Zvuki Mu CD (translated by yours truly):

   Greetings to All from the Swamp: Zvuki Mu’s “Greenie” [Зелёненький]
   (RMG), 2004

   For a long time now the group “Zvuki Mu” has been a pseudonym for a single person. Toward the end of the nineties Pyotr Mamonov no longer needed virtuoso guitar riffs, keyboard arrangements, or fellow musicians of any sort. Mamonov was left all by himself, his records changed in quality, but not for the worse—it’s just that the musician gradually went off somewhere toward the border of sense and nonsense, and started creating things at this boundary that the pen cannot describe. Pyotr Nikolayevich is the only Russian rocker of the old guard who is called by his patronymic and about whom assertions of genius seem not a provocational declaration but conventional wisdom. If someone were to compile a list of the best Russian albums honestly, not limiting oneself to a single record by a single performer and the rest of the artificial framework of list-making, one would have to include at least 10 albums by Zvuki Mu. And the latest, issued back in 2004 under the title “Greenie,”* would be near the top of that group of ten.

   Mamonov records his albums where he lives—a small town in the sticks—and the number of accompanying musical instruments keeps decreasing—although, after his last disc Mice 2002 it seemed that it couldn’t get any smaller. But no—a bass has somehow shown up, once or twice over a layer of acoustic guitar we get feedback from an amp with no guitar plugged in, sometimes there’s a strange rustling or knocking. This not very savvy sound mixing becomes a very expressive substrate for Mamonov’s lyrics, which he moans, mumbles, howls, screams, rasps, and chews on so that the already expressive words start to act on you physically almost. You can get rid of the words from these songs, you can’t smother them, or kill them, more likely they’ll kill you, smother you and take all your words away. Over his 20-year life in the arts, Mamonov has learned to speak about seemingly ordinary things in seemingly ordinary words in such a way that the frightening abyss of day-to-day life opens up in all its awful glory, and sucks you in, and won’t let you go. It seems as if Pyotr Nikolayevich is singing about himself, but he worms his way right into your soul and mucks about there rather freely, turns you inside out—but such a preventive maintenance seems necessary somehow. You can feel proud that you listen to Nurse with Wound or Nikolay Sudnika while you read or clean potatoes, but with Mamonov you can’t pull off that stunt. Zelenenkiy closes in on you, forces you to blow off everything else and enter into this strange, unrecognizable stream of consciousness. He’s not scary—and yet I’m frightened.

   In the final analysis, Pyotr Nikolayevich’s disc isn’t just music, just as his shows aren’t just theater. It’s rather some special form of life, a way of apprehending reality—when someone says they’re in a “Mamonov mood,” you know exactly what they mean. The disc is inserted into the player, and the surrounding world is transformed, it bares its painful absurdity, comes out all angles and needles—all this pulled off by a balding middle-aged guy with a badly tuned guitar. “Shhhh,” he says. “Shhhhhhh.”

   —Aleksandr Gorbachev, Muscience

   P.S. This is all a way of saying that on March 8, on the stage of the Stanislavsky Theater, the premier of Pyotr Mamonov’s new show, “Mice, Little Kai, and the Snow Queen,” will take place. The appearance of Pyotr Nikolayevich onstage is a special, truly incomparable event, and one doesn’t often get the chance to see him, so it’s worth rousing yourself to get there.
   __________
   *A lame attempt at rendering Зелёненький, which is the adjective зелёный (green) but with a “diminutive” ending (i.e., giving it the feel of a term of endearment).—Tr.

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