Stuzha – Siberian Sketches

Behind every country lies another country, a land of memory and myth. Because this hidden country has a hold on the imagination, it is often more real than the actual country. When the concrete crumbles, the spirits flow and the eyes close, it is the only country that remains.

Stuzha’s Russia is not the contemporary Russia, a nation wracked by protest and torn by identity crisis, caught between modernity and the iron hand. Stuzha’s Russia is instead the timeless, stateless Russia, a land of tall firs and deep snows, restless bears and hungry wolves: the land of Cossacks and peasants, hidden villages and unidentifiable cries. The film Sauna provides a worthy corollary: one is never safe in these woods, inhabited by creatures so old their names have been forgotten.

To listen to Siberian Sketches is to travel through these lands like a lone huntsman. The location-based field recordings are mixed so far upfront that it is never clear whether they are accompanying the music or vice versa. Each track carries the listener to a different sonic environment. A man struggles to light a fire; he stamps his feet and blows on his hands for warmth. As the embers die, his boots crunch on the hard-packed terrain. He nears a stream whose cold can be intuited by its timbre; he finds shelter in a dripping cave. All around him, the wind blows, emotionless, oblivious to the gathering frost on his eyebrows, the diminishing feeling in his leather-lined toes.

As he is enveloped by the fog, perhaps he begins to remember, perhaps to hallucinate. The folk songs of his youth flutter to him in snatches of melody and assaults of song. At times it seems as though a choir is passing by, somehow immune to the deluge. How is it possible, he thinks, that as they emerge, all other sounds recede? Are those the hoofsteps of his father’s horse approaching? Is that the voice of a seraph, descending from the clouds, imploring him to ride the notes skyward to an uncertain destination?

The album unfolds like a nesting doll. On the outer layer, the sound of Siberia: the wind, the water, the woods. And below it, a man: a singular, physical presence, a protagonist caught up in a larger story. Beneath him lies the folklore, brought to life by samples of the Sretensky and Sveshnikova Choirs. And under this, the music, which seeps into the consciousness like an afterthought: acoustic guitars, rattling percussion and melancholy keyboard drones, which shelter the final matrushka, the unspeakable, unshakable core: Mother Russia, the country behind the country, eternal, invincible, and true.

To listen to Siberian Sketches is to be sequentially comforted, challenged and shaken. It’s the first of a two-part project by Daniel Kazantsev, who also records as _Algol_. While the opening salvo is purposely autumnal, the following installment will likely be frigid in nature, dedicated to the victims of Siberian labor camps. Kazantsev has been recording this project for years, and his attention to detail shows. Infused with the spirit of its native land, Siberian Sketches is as true as Tolstoy and as picturesque as Shishkin.

- Richard Allen for Fluid Radio

www.stuzha.info
www.snowytensionpole.bandcamp.com/album/siberian-sketches