- A gripping, sometimes devastating portrait of cultural heritage and history from producers across Central Asia and Eastern Europe.
- One of the most haunting tracks on A Collective Memoir comes from Russian artist Foresteppe, whose "Zola" is actually a cover of a band from Novosibirsk called tdpinv. In the liner notes for the compilation, the artist, who is also a history teacher, explains how some of his students wanted to play it for their graduation, but couldn't find any sheet music. Here Foresteppe records it himself from memory, with intricately layered acoustic guitar strums all in different tunings spiraling out at once, as if he couldn't remember the exact right way to play it. It's a musical seance, a performance of an old song that only seems to exist in one person's mind, a replication of memory in in a deeply personal way. The track ends with a field recording of a railway that has since been destroyed, completing the metaphor—we're hearing a past that no longer exists.
Compiled by Armenian festival Urvakan in lieu of holding their 2020 festival during the pandemic, A Collective Memoir asks its artist to evoke "collective memories" through sound. Focusing on artists from Central Asia and Eastern Europe, the album, which skews towards ambient music, features field recordings that set a time and place, cut through with intensely personal feelings. Perila's "Double Echo," for example, was inspired by her own memories of protest in Russia, but weaves in clips of a Soviet film that asks regular people on the street questions like, "What is love?" These aren't Perila's own memories, but she finds comfort in them all the same.
The "collective" part is key. These eight artists come from different countries with sometimes torrid relationships and histories, but they all tap into the same realm of uneasy nostalgia. Were things better then, or are they better now? Can we trust our memories? Very often, A Collective Memoir is funereal. Georgian artist Ana Jikia's "Splint" is musique concrète inspired by school shooters, an eerie and uncanny assemblage of human voices manipulated beyond semantic meaning (except for one phrase: "all that matters is that you have an angle"). Perila and Kyiv producer Nikolaienko both pay tribute to old Soviet jazz, with vibraphones and other instruments wading, disembodied, through effects and filters, like flickers of flashbacks from a bygone era.
Not that it's all doom and gloom. Moscow's L delivers a hilarious and sometimes uncomfortable palate cleanser with "Stretched Logo," twisting and pulling apart a sample from a famous 1990 commercial, the results goofy and exaggerated. And Odessa artist Chillera's "Porto Franco" is a portrait of growth from decay, paying tribute to her hometown's long history as a free port as well as the realities of its current economy. In the peripheries of their recording you can hear a band practice in a dockyard that has since been decommissioned, where a new kind of life grows in the shadow of the death of another.
These differing moods paint a complex picture of memory. Sometimes expressing memory pays tribute to something you wish you could have again—other times, you can't imagine ever going back. There are memories of things that seem unthinkable or unattainable, and places that now seem unreal. Maybe a memory represents all of those things at once, or it means something more complex, something uncertain. It would be easy to call A Collective Memoir a mournful shared history, but even its saddest moments are more than that.
The closing song "False Awakening," from Armenian ex-punk Nystagmus, is an assemblage of instrumentation and field recordings made at a university in Shushi, part of the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh territory claimed by both Armenia and Azerbaijan. (Armenians know the land as Artsakh.) The school was over 100 years old but was destroyed during the 2020 war between the two countries, in which Azerbaijan took Shushi by force. The building and its rich history is gone now, its cultural legacy suppressed. It lives on in "False Awakening," a tribute whose forlorn organs and gentle melodies waft through the air around you, a reminder—or introduction—to a place that will never exist again, and yet feels tangible, almost real.
Tracklist01. Ana Jikia - Splint
02. Chillera - Porto Franco feat. DJ Graffity
03. Foresteppe - Zola (TDPINV Cover)
04. I s - Այն ժամանակ ինչպես հիմա
05. Perila - Double Echo
06. Nikolaienko - Antenaa
07. L - Stretched Logo
08. Nystagmus - False Awakening