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About russian-american mixtures in the avant-garde or…

If Gogol and Daniil Kharms wrote music, instead of words, this is what it would sound like.
I begin writing this quite worried and led by my emotions. And here is the reason – nothing reflects the subjective dialectics of recent years quite like this comparison.
It’s like a globe – if you spin it, you don’t know where you would end up. A part of this mystery relates to the coming together of musicians from both sides of the Iron curtain, new and old.
Here is where we have to separate the plot in two storylines, that happen simultaneously, parallel with time and space, intertwining and in the end, we get to the final result. On one hand, we have John Zorn’s headliners, with downtown and avant-garde music from New York – John Medeski, Marc Ribot, Chess Smith, аnd on the other hand we have Sergey Kuryokhin‘s Leonid Fyodorov, Vladimir Volkov and the unique avant-garde group Auktyon. Those two parallel lines will have to somehow meet, or as our favourite Boris Grebenshchikov says: “Let's curl the straight lines into a ring.”
In the United States John Zorn is the creator of a fascinating new world with numerous projects ranging from church music, organ, to the most brutal hardcore projects, where Japanese musicians and Mike Patton take part… You can’t even write about exactly how rich and versatile Zorn’s world is, now is not the time…
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world – sometime during the 80’s Sergey Kuryokhyn is not just a genius pianist and composer, but also one of those leading the avant-garde movement in the Soviet Union (an excellent example is Aquarium’s “Radio Africa” – recorded in 1983, during a winter night, in a moving wagon made studio, with a bottle of vodka – it later became album of the year!) – a cynical, brave genius.
So, at some point during the 80’s John Zorn аnd Sergey Kuryokhin find themselves together in Japan (where Zorn is living at the time and even speaks the language). Later on, Kuryokhin travels to New York where they meet again.
Thirty years later we get to Leonid Fyodorov and Auktyon’s last two projects – both with musicians playing with Zorn.
Auktyon, Medeski, Ribot - "Devushki Poyut".
There are a lot of fun facts that come with recording the first (and probably the second) project. The Russians don’t speak any English and vice versa. They talk to each other by means of a translator or through the music. And despite that slight barrier, the result is more than impressive – lively, pulsating music, with loads of humour, loads of sadness, depth and drama.
Maybe one of the biggest secret weapons of music is that it lacks a haptic feel – you can’t touch it, you can’t measure it. It’s a separate language, it’s like mathematics and like another way to communicate. Probably the simplest and the most universal way to communicate. In that sense, the two albums of the Russian-American avant-garde - „Girls sing” and „Razin Rim I Lev“ are in a way like pictures. And what they prove is that when you’re fluent in music as a language, you don’t need any other.

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