International Panorama

On June 18, Polly Jin Harvey, who will introduce the ninth album “The Hope Six Demolition Project”, will perform on Ahmad Tea Music Festival . This record is musical documentary, which has developed after traveling on not happier places on the planet and requiring additional explanations. Radif Kashapov made a brief guide to the world Pi Jay Harvey.

"Letland Shake"

The previous album Polly Gene Harvey was released in 2011. “Damn Europeans! Return me to beautiful England, ”is sung in one of the songs from him: this is a story about wars (mainly the First World War) and their consequences, devoid of stray beauty - only deafening realism. Having demonstrated on " Let England Shake » New sound - rolled, sweeping, preaching, Pi Jarvey compared herself to the" military song correspondent. " By the way, many participants in this entry play on The Hope Six Demolition Project .

In August 2013, Harvey released the single “Shaker Aamer” dedicated to the last British prisoner of Guantanamo. Quotes from Aamer, who arranged a hunger strike a year earlier, was handed over to the singer by his lawyer. Pi Jay Harvey tried on a new album, where it was not about the past, but about the present, documentary.

Sheimus Murphy

For more than 20 years, the Irish military photographer has been traveling around the world, and they especially love them Afghanistan, which he first visited in 1994. Sheimus Murphy received the World Press Photo Awards seven times. Pi Jay Harvey began to cooperate with him during the recording of the album “Let England Shake” , interested in his Afghan pictures. They made 12 short films for each song from the record and published the joint book “The Hollow of the Hand” .

Kosovo

The Hope Six Demolition Project has three geographical points of support - Kosovo, Afghanistan and the USA. Judging by the singer’s interview, other countries could be in this list - for example, Japan.

“I wanted to breathe air, feel the ground, meet people and countries that would fascinate me,” Pi Jarvey explained the reasons for her travels.

In the summer of 2011, they and Murphy went to the city to show at the Dokufest Clips Festival Clips-Koro-Rooster settings taken to the songs on Let England Shake . And after several days they traveled around the neighborhood. Among the places visited by them, there are Jyakovitsa, from where almost all the Serbs were expelled during the war. In Bogushevichs, they met a tagger, a woman in black, guarding the entrance to the village - she became the heroine of the song “Chain of Keys” .

On August 4, the singer and the photographer saw a damn wheel in Kosovo-Pol. Personnel made during a trip to Kosovo can be seen in the video for the main song of the album “The Wheel” , full of emotions from communicating with people who survived the war. The wheel is spinning, the children disappear in a meat grinder. What remains? " And Watch Them Fade out " . An allusion to thousands of photographs that overwhelmed the government building in Kosovo at the turn of the century is another example of memory, to change something powerless.

By the way, a man who dances with a glass on his head is called Nosyoy Krieziu, he is from the village of Brazn, he died this year. Polly Gene Harvey found out when she returned to Kosovo for additional personnel in December 2015.

Afghanistan

At the end of 2012, the singer and photographer flew to Kabul-the summer trip had to be moved by six months due to too frequent terrorist attacks. According to Murphy, they were carried by the same driver, whose services he used for 10 years. No one in the country recognized Harvey. Among the places they visited are the former Bagram air base. Here was collected material for the poem “The Beggars” and the track “The Ministry of Social Affars” . The full name of the building is the Ministry of Labor, Social Affairs and assistance to martyrs and disabled. Nearby, the photographer recalls, a young man with emaciated hands and a legless pregnant dog sat. The street sounds of Kabul fell into the song “Dollar, Dollar” - about children asking for alms. The Afghan shootings of Sheymus Murphy can be seen in the video “The Orange Monkey” , released in early July.

Washington

Hope VI , who fell into the name of the new album Pi Jarvey, is a North American project that began in 1992, during which old municipal houses are demolished in dysfunctional areas. In their place, new, the best in quality of the building, but many of the former residents cannot afford to live in new buildings. A peculiar social stripping of areas. It is sung about it in the song “The Community of Hope” , this is a literal description of one of the areas: “Here is a project to demolish Hope VI . We move down Benning Road, well known as the “Death Way”; At least they told me that. But only one sitting restaurant in the Ward, 7, cute. O'Kay, now it is just a city of drugs, the city of zombies. Well, this is life. "

“They will build Walmart here”-the last refrain in The Community of Hope -said Paul Schwarzman, journalist The Washington Post , who drove Murphy and Harvey on his broken “Mazde” in dysfunctional areas of the city when they arrived there in April 2014. Only then did he find out that he became a guide for a rock star. The hypermarket was never built there, and the song caused indignation among the local authorities: they say, the Englishwoman arrived and scolded without understanding. The former mayor of the Columbia district Vincent Gray said: "I will not award this stupid composition with an answer."

Harwie also got for this song from musical critics: she indicates problems, but does not offer solutions. As the producer of the album Flood says: “She wanted to say to people: here, this is what I saw with my own eyes. I am not going to express my opinion, I just attract your attention so that you see what was happening and can draw your conclusions. This is not politics. This is that you need to understand that different things are happening in the world. ”

The action of the song “Near the Memorials to Vietnam and Lincoln” takes place in Washington - it describes how the boy pretends that he casts the feed by the starlings, although his hands are empty (the most popular assumption is that Harvey has such a metaphor for political agitation). “River anacostia” describes the Bednyatsky district on the banks of the river of the same name (when Murphy returned there in January, he was robbed: they knocked on the head and selected the camera). Medicinals are talking about the National Alley of Washington Park, in which the Museum of the American Indians is located: Harvey attracted in it the image of a native of the United States, killing himself alcohol.

"Hollow of the Hand"

The book of poems and photographs that Pi Jay Harvey debuted as a poet. At the presentation in October last year, Sheimus Murphy showed pictures and video stories about their movements around the world, and Harvey read poetry and played new songs that grew out of these verses. Say, the basis of “The Community of Hope” is the poem “Sight-Eeeing, South of the River” . “Poetry and dreaming are different things, and I did not understand this until I began [to write poetry],” Harvey explains differences. - In verses, you need to create the whole world completely, in these words everything should be at once. They cannot be supported by music to say what is underneath. ”

Musicians

The first thing you pay attention to the record is the abundance of winds. Harvey herself played on the saxophone in the Automatic Dlamini project, which was in charge of her permanent associate John Parish. At concerts, she also often joins the wind section. And in Near the Memorials to Vietnam and Lincoln is taken by the violin.

Among the noticeable names are the saxophonist Mike Smith, known for working with Damon Albarkan in Gorillaz , Blur , Mali Music Project . John Parish, who has played Harvey since 1994 (as well as recorded almost all albums with her, including two duet), in addition to many tools, uses a variophone in recording - an electronic wind instrument invented in Cologne in 1975. Flood producer who started with New Order , and in recent years I had a hand in the albums of Foals (“Holy Fire”) , Depeche Mode (“Delta Machine”) , and Warpain (“Warpain”) also responsible for back vocals, and in “The Ministry of Social Affairs” inserts sounds toy blaster. He, like the guitarist Mick Harvey, constantly collaborates with a longtime friend Polly - Nick Kave. The Ministry of Defense is read by the Jamaic poet Linton Quezi Johnson, the hard voice of Bripston, a modern classic in the Dub Poestesian genre. Probably an example of imitation for Harvey.

"Recording in Progress"

The album was recorded in Somerset House, an impressive building in the style of classicism near the Waterloo bridge, one of the most visited art museums in the world. Of course, in the art space, another project could not but be born, “Recording in Progress” : three thousand people could come here for four days to see how the record process is going. A step for Harvey, not particularly open to communication with the public of a person, is significant. As the musicians explain, although they could not see and hear behind the transparent walls of the audience, their presence disciplined. In addition, they refused during sessions from phones and computers. As a result, 18 songs were recorded - from January 16 to February 14, 2015. In The Hope Six Demolition Project there are 11 of them. We are waiting for the rest.

Ahmad Tea Music Fest will be held on June 18 in the Museon Art Park. Participants: PJ Harvey, The Maccabees and Django Django.