at the festival at Plug & Play

The Red Club hosted its fourth annual Plug & Play festival. DMITRY PERVUSHIN joined Russian electronic music.
Club promoters rarely pay attention to Russian electronics, as well as to the underground in general. This card was played by the curator of the Plug & Play festival Andrey Mukhomorov - the curator of the festival, the owner of the electronic label Cheburec, and part-time art director of Red Club. This year, Mr. Mukhomorov abandoned the usual foreign headliner, invited Russian bands with a good level of live performances and divided the event into two days: the first for deeper music, the second for conventionally entertaining music.
When the St. Petersburg band Fizzarum took the stage on the first evening, the hall was already full. Two members of Fizzarum operated three laptops, producing a signature crunchy beat and warm bass rumble that the musicians wrapped in an unpredictable web of melodies. Fizzarum, whose album was released several years ago on the same English Domino label that launched Franz Ferdinand, also showed off their latest experiments with interactive sound synthesis, which turned out to be not only entertaining, but even pleasant to the ear. Next came the group "Christmas Tree Toys". Having played a short set of their solo material to the approving swaying of the audience, “Toys” invited Stas Baretsky to the stage, the singer with whom they created the main musical scandal of the current season, crossing experimental electronics with the growling poetry of Russian chanson. Having greeted the audience with a three-story obscenity, truth teller Baretsky, who had recently experienced a series of sold-out shows in Moscow clubs and performances with Leningrad (the group performed two of his songs), sang with previously incredible pressure and confidence about the fate of Russia, culture and himself. About myself in the sense that I became a star, but had no money. But there are fans, at least one formed right there, jumped onto the stage and performed a dance for Mr. Baretsky in the spirit of a soft striptease.
The night part (for the convenience of the public, the organizers divided the program into an evening concert and a night dance), set aside for fashionable intelligent techno, began with a set by the minimal house project Oira, to which the audience instantly danced. The Izhevsk group D-pulse, four very young people with two synthesizers, a bass and a guitar, picked up the wave: something like a rare feeling of unity arose in the audience through this pure, one might even say kind, sound that seemed to come from another planet.
When the headliners of the night part of SCSI-9 (“Skyzy Nine”) appeared, the hall was completely moved. The creators of the most prestigious Russian dance project on the world underground stage, Anton Kubikov and Maxim Milyutenko, sat on chairs behind two laptops and a remote control and showed the best that electronic music is interesting: an ideal balance of frequencies, unique sounds, physically affecting bass and the emotional minor characteristic of SCSI-9 . It was really strong, the audience left silently.
The second day was much more chaotic: the groups did not unite in style, there were many random spectators, and the hall cooled down after each performance. But there was an ovation, and it went to the group “Kim and Buran”, which masterfully mastered the poetics of Soviet television music of the late 1970s and continued the tradition of “Zodiac” and “A Knife for Frau Müller”. The opening of the evening was the dark, but very convincing-looking electroclash trio Gender ID. The evening's headliners, the Muscovites "Robots", rather disappointed with their persistent and empty techno-pop, and the electro-trash art diva SuperAlice once again lost the audience a dividend with her program, opening her mouth to the soundtrack.
But overall, the current Plug & Play went quite well. Now we can say that the Russian electronic scene in Russia has emerged from its state of autism and is successfully acquiring an interested listener.

Newspaper "Kommersant St. Petersburg" No. 20/P dated 02/06/2006, p. 3

Chanson of high technologies