On Rave and Drive

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.