Staraya Derevnya – Blue Forty-nine

Blue Tapes

I’ve yet to see this band live; life always conspires against it, but I’m glad this tantalising snapshot from their 2022 Café OTO show has made it out there. A beautifully packaged Blue Tapes item that amplifies the primal weirdness of Staraya Derevnya‘s studio recordings, takes things to a whole new level.

The transformative shivers hit early and stay throughout, each track lifting out of an alchemic soup of accented colour to perform a sticky-fingered root around your synapse. Instinctive magic that robs you of reality and transports you elsewhere.

The effervescent “Bubbling Pelt”, its reverbed plucks inviting you into its tugging gravitationals, glued up by a firm bassline and clickety sticks, peppered in peyote chant, all energetically escalating on kazoo track-lines and trembling tensives. Munch-like nocturnes that doomically beam, pucker in the converge, the contracted slippage occasionally screaming out. A clandestine candy-store that acid-baths the jelly-eyed eel of modernity, reconnects you with your Cromagnon core.

The loose-leaf melt of shapes on “Boulder Blues” releasing a poppy-garbled communion, over-driven to a shuffling primal that’s awesome. Gets you smashing the sky with fist-flowered hands, unclenching to collapse into what sounds like a bunch of rutting shopping trolleys — a cymbalised reprise full of shapely deforms that inform the mechanical abstraction of “Gallant Spider”. A track that crawls over you in an Edward Scissorhands-like metallic buttering silhouetted in a pattering purr.

The electronics and bass enter slowly, echo across each other until they knit a satisfying union, antelope-dance your head in the vocal bounce, hexed in deep droning woodwind, glinting shells and gristing kazoo. Curving kinetics that slam into the hushed conclusion that is “Thorny Orbs”, a sinister softness flicker-fed in blisters that drive luminous, limpid white towards a dusky cyanotype horizon.

Another gem from the Staraya Derevnya collective that clearly shows what I’ve been missing out on.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-