By Yuri IZDRYK, The Day
Once, talking to an a friend who was also expert on modern music, I
mentioned "rave" disparagingly. My friend said he agreed one hundred percent
and we spent quite some time afterward mulling over the "youth culture"
which we did not to comprehend but felt right to condemn, until we became
aware that we were talking like two conservative bourgeoises unable to
appreciate anything new (which, of course, did not make us change our views
on rave, which only confirms our diagnosis).
I felt very much the same way recently, after playing a cassette of
Chernihiv's Foa Hoka rock group and after leafing through a brochure called
Somnambulistic Beetle containing texts composed by that group leader,
Dmytro Kurovsky. I played their music and read the brochure, all the time
feeling as though I were standing in front of glass door barring access
to an entirely different world, and that, much as I wanted to enter, I
had no key. I tried to imagine what all those young people "creating" this
"art" had to have been nourished on, what books they had read, what music
they had listened to, what movies they had watched. I could not. Dmytro
Kuratovsky's verse is, without doubt, self-contained; it cannot be qualified
as anything betraying that "applied" character which we detect in most
modern lyrics. His verse is very much out of the ordinary, with sudden
sparkling images followed by a chain of responses leaving yours truly in
the dark. However, listening to his verse and music makes one perceive
them in an altogether different quality; here verse turns into pure phonetics,
almost completely sterile in terms of sense. The more so that the manner
of articulation makes one strain one's ear to make sure what language is
being used. Whereas Foa Hoka's earliest records show Ukrainian authenticity
that cannot possibly be faked, today their music seems something reaching
above and beyond the national limits; it is simply a cosmos they built
single-handedly, collecting the material where and whenever they could
on this planet. Listening to Foa Hoka, I find myself pondering Lewis Carroll,
Viktor Pelevin, Massive Attack and Protishead that would probably make
an expert laugh. Also, I remembered Kyiv's excellent capella "Sugar, White
Death" and certainly the legendary Lay Back with whom Foa Hoka perfromed
in a joint concert last year. After all, drawing any parallels seems irrelevant
and improper. Foa Hoka is a group which has its own characteristic visage,
so one can distinguish between it and others in the field. Actually, distinguishing
is not the word, for I relied on my reflections triggered off by their
"airtight" music and lyrics. If I had the key to that glass door (my virtual
reality, to be sure), I would surely find more expressive and accurate
allusions. Anyway, "somnambulistic" is a notion borrowed from the collection's
title which paradoxically conforms to the nature of that composition, although
I would have never used "somnambulistic" with regard to their life-asserting,
ironic music.
Frankly, writing about something you do not quite understand is not
very comfortable; here one can rely on one's intuition trying to distinguish
between genuine and sham creations, the latter can furtively set in to
replace your way of thinking, your way of perception, something you have
always taken for granted. That was probably why, listening to their sunlit
composition, I felt sorrowful; apparently the time had come for new things
to appear in the creative domain, but I would never be able to grasp their
full significance. And I wanted so much to know, maybe even guess what
all those youngsters stepping into recording studios, working there, and
producing their special music, were really after.
After finishing the closing sentence of the above paragraph I remembered
my own extensive experimentation with sound when working on a project titled
"Music for Serbs and Croats" several years back. It would seem that worrying
on it, being engrossed in my own quest, I would have been better equipped
to comprehend the Foa Hoka phenomenon. So perhaps I should not give way
to despair? Or say farewell to my youth prematurely? It is quite possible
that there nothing new or old, modern or traditional, and that all manifestations
of true art are actually a part of a certain single whole, as simple and
understandable as the ultimate truth.
Anyway, I am talking real art, so I won't be listening to rave.






