Interview THE MOGLASS

Uno dei fenomeni che ci ha sempre incuriosito è l'evoluzione di alcune scene musicali "esotiche". Tra queste sta mostrando di recente un notevole fervore nell'ambito della musicale sperimentale l'Est Europeo ed è dalla non troppo lontana Ucraina, che siamo andati a pescare i Moglass, formazione che già avevamo ascoltato in un lavoro pubblicato dalla net label Autoplate di cui era insigne co-firmatario Andrey Kirichenko, già abbastanza addentrato nella sperimentazione. In occasione della pubblicazione di Sparrow Juice per la Nexsound, abbiamo voluto che il suo portavoce Yuri Kulishenko ci facesse conoscere meglio il progetto e il concept (non sempre facilmente accessibile sul piano semantico per via della difficile comprensione per chi scrive dell'ucraino), buon esempio di elettrofolk e sperimentazione, con frequente ricorso all'uso delle field recording. Dunque, buona lettura!

Hi there. First of all, how are you? Hi! Preparing for the vacation - pretty good!

Could you introduce your project to our readers? We are a three-piece band from Ukraine. We rather feel ourselves as a some kind of rock band - bedroom style, you know, as lo-fi rockers and that stuff. Each of us does different things instrument-wise, and deals with different kinds of musicianship - but we definitely fit comfortably into the typical roles of singing guitar player, bassist (who occasionally does sax) and keyboard player. (on Sparrow Juice everything's pretty different though.)

Some people classify your genre as post-rock... We note some similitudes with other projects such as Post Human or other British and Canadian bands, which are generally filed under electronics... But there are some similarities with Godspeed You Black Emperor, too... So what? Never heard of the Post Human. I don't like the name as i have obvious allergy to all things dealing with prefix "post-". Surely the same is with post-rock. I liked the term when Simon Reynolds coined it twelve years ago but it sounds meaningless to me now. I have never aimed to be filed under 'electronics' also - it sounds for me like to be filed under 'electrics' or 'acoustics'. When I see the word ‘electronics’ as a category - I'd rather think about late sixties stuff - Morton Subotnick or David Tudor. Although we did make a recording a few months ago - it's 30 plus minutes long and done using vintage analogue synths only. That thing may be called 'electronics' I believe. As for gybe (or how is it spelled now? g!ybe?) I liked their first disc and early live boots - we listened to it during recording of "telegraph poles..." so it could have kinda influenced that album. But they have a completely different approach - strictly composed and structured. And our stuff is completely improvised - I don't remember the last time when we "performed a song". Things go structured when I start compiling the record for releasing.

Some titles in Sparrow Juice are something like encrypted code for listeners. Is it a way to stay "esotheric" or what? Hey, they're encrypted even for us! I made a number of field recordings "intermezzos" and had a problem with naming those tracks in a way that would fit the style of the artwork. So i created a number of pseudo-hieroglyphs instead.

What about the cover artwork? Is it a sort of representation of the world in an Orwellian way??? Definitely no. I'd want listeners to think of Sparrow Juice as a pop record. First, in a way we may think of "rainbow in a curved air" as a pop record - the music on Sparrow Juice is pretty happy and light - although it doesn't sound like pop. Second, it's pop because it contains a naive and very lightweight take on musical culture. Which is sorta reflected on its cover - take on finding a way for a naive interaction with serious things or something.

What about the gesture of Sparrow Juice? The story is that in the mid-eighteenth century there was an ambassador or something at the court of some of the Russian empresses. German ambassador, I believe. And he stayed in St. Petersburg - or I don't know exactly where it was - for the rest of his life, and then wrote memoires - pretty obscure now - I never saw it, just read about the case. And those memoires were in Russian - still sort of foreign language for him. So he described at some point the girl's eyes as "full of sparrow juice". This sounds nonsensical in Russian and I believe in all European languages, and definitely was written by some incomprehensible mistake. And sounds pretty shocking for some people, too. Some of my friends found the name disgusting and violent at first. But it sounds really poetic though. I liked this to that extent that I decided to give this name to our album. And I believe that the name interacts with the artwork and music somehow.

How do you think your music will interact with other form of art? I usually don't like things intentionally manifesting themselves as "multimedia art" - in a sort of way i hate someone manifesting himself as a post-something artist and stuff. But today the music in no way exists in a form of a pure sound distinguishable from everything surrounding it. So I think our music is already interacting with visuals of album covers, performance of live concerts etc. as for the future, we'd happily do a film soundtrack. But i know nothing about cinema world.

A plenty of barren sounds and isolationism plus plucky guitars in this new act.. if you should make a comparison between Sparrow Juice and Telegraph Poles..? There are five years between them - so "telegraph poles" are getting smaller and smaller for us, you know. Technically "poles" were edited from several hours of improvisations made during three evenings. So the record represents a short period of life with its influences, moods and thoughts. And "Sparrow Juice" is a compilation of sorts - it features recordings made in very different situations and circumstances, and those recordings are rather compiled to represent some idea (which I think is incommunicable in other ways).

A lot of records coming from ex-CCCP feature a certain depressive mood and a great appeal to field recordings... it seems that frenzy mechanical and looped beats don't match to that artistic scene apart of some exceptions. what's the reason in your opinion? First I don't think we can speak about music from ex-cccp in general. There are several independent scenes - although very small ones - in those countries, and they are rather different. I'd agree about Russian music where dark and occult and postindustrial stuff dominates. Here in Ukraine i think there's too much stuff with beats - I'm definitely not a fan of it. And those acts who feature live improvisation are too much obscured. They deserve a wider exposure.

track-by-track comment *
as I don't want to uncover the mystery completely, I'd prefer to avoid commenting all of them.
1.The field recording. Its time and place are meaningful to me. But I don't think it's right to uncover it. So no comment!
2.Obviously political lyric It was initially the improvisation that I planned to morph into a song for which I found a melody but didn't succeed in finding right words hence the name.
3.N.C.
4.Revisited With K. Contains the sample of our track 'kakerlakische kakerlak' from 'snake-tongued swallow-tailed'. We improvised over it at my place using guitar, alto and a player with recordings of children playing in a backyard. Our bassist Vova Bovtenko's 8-years old son Kostya was present. We made a few takes and at some moment Kostya took the microphone for alto and started singing which he had never done before. Impressed by what happened we laid this take over the others.
5.N.C.
6.Maya Britanova I made this song all by myself. First part featuring basses was made 3 or something years ago. I added two layers of laptop improvisation later. The name of the song is of my wife's schoolmate. She had golden earrings at the age of 8, and spoke French also.
7.N.C.
8.Leering Raspberries Year 2004 late night acoustic guitar/synth improv. We wanted to make it less dramatic and more ornamental than we did live that time (listen to our live cdr on Kvely Palach to compare) so it made it to "sparrow juice"
9.N.C.
10.Serious Mocking Bird Features sound of cuckoo clock parts
11.N.C.
12.Indirect News Kinda composed song - in a sense I knew from the beginning which instruments and which manner of playing should be used for it.
13.N.C.
14.Leering Raffles related to track 8.
15.N.C.
16.Less freeform song on the album. reworked track from "rural psychogeography" compilation. actually it's a song with words and once i sang it live.
17.N.C.
18.Asimuth Vibrating The name derives from leonora carrington's "hearing trumpet" novel.
19.relates to track 1 obviously.

* non abbiamo trascritto i titoli in ucraino per ovvie ragioni di incomprensione linguistica