Staraya Derevnya – Inwards Opened The Floor / Staraya Derevnya and Hans Grusel’s Krankenkabinet ‎- Still Life With Apples

Staraya Derevnya (CD) / Raash (cassette) / Steep Gloss

Russian – Israeli – UK collective Staraya Derevnya dish up a refreshingly eclectic aesthetic where anything and everything has musical potential. A free-form exploration that’s open ended and primal which reaches into the unpredictable to pluck out some smouldering gold.

The first offering is a full-length album, recorded during a short residency at Café OTO’s Project Space. Inwards Opened The Floor is a seven-track work influenced by the Saint Petersburg poet and artist Arthur Molev, and the first track eases you into its world view with gentle post-rock glints and spectral promise as a repeated lament becomes a breath-born nest of insects.

Limbering latitudes offset the rhythmically charged outpourings of the next track, “Chirik Is Heard From The Treetops”, brilliantly. It’s an urgent percussive, nosebagging some Renaldo And The Loaf gymnastics that scoot’n’skate around a double bass’s pointy shoes like some arcane medieval festival as this pinned-back ping of piano intensifies into a mental zenith decorated in kazoooooo glee and junkyard staccato.

As my first real taste of the Staraya Derevnya beast, this is ace, holds you in its crook’ed corona, lights my head up in stabbing colour, and the more measured bleed of “Flicked The Ash In Kefir” just heightens that impression. A fractured psychedelia of jigsawing shapes that breeze towards a glorious discordant bow wave, this insanity of wide-eyed yell, triangulated with sploshy pulled muscle and blaring trumpet. These peeps certainly fly and the excellent rub of the next track, “Hogweed Is Done With Buckwheat”, has them shimmying in with taut overdriven intensives that slant a satisfying savagery.

They balance the searching shapes of improv with a rewarding riot so well, dose you with a tease of rhythmic sensibilities that, like the Turkish Konstrukt or Sunburned Hand Of The Man, burn in sweet conversation, asymmetrically swizzle your hemispheres. The way “Burning Bush And Apple Saucer”’s haemorrhaging harmonics fold you into its queasy centre has you swinging its duetting Slavic tight ropes, marvelling to the melodic fornication underneath.

Yeah, it’s a satisfying listen, angels its architecture beautifully, the flickering fortune of “Inwards Opened The Floor” spearing you with clattering pools and daggering divergence, leaving the last track lounging in a splintered luminosity. “Forgot What Was Important” is a jazz-tinged / Popol Vuh shiver that ends proceedings with a languished sigh of arrowed ambience.

In a word – faultless.

The second offering, Still Life With Apples, has Staraya Derevnya joined by noise nomads Hans Grusel’s Krankenkabinet for a two-part live document, and what a lush listen it is.

Both bands breathe round the shapes they create, conspire, latch-key a steady flow of dynamics, push cohesively to then crumble back into shuffling skittlebacks and worn-out mechanicals. A subtle shimmering that contrary to expectation has Gretel and Hans Grusel of Krankenkabinet fame reining in the chaos, descending the usual scare-case to sonically fray / solder / nibble at the Staraya patchworks. Can’t believe I missed the opportunity to see this paring live, but I’m so glad the action has been so perfectly pickled.

An excellent bloom of cross-cut dynamics announces “Part 1” (recorded at the Tusk Festival) in an incessant texturals / distresses punctured by yazoo calls and errant electronics. A curving kinetic that propulsively peaks then troughs into a splattered unease, garnished in fluttering frets. The Reservoir Dogs re-imagining of the cover slowly sinking in as stretchy symphonics languidly slip the dryness of shells, spur off on multiple focus points that pull at the fabric like drugged hyenas.

“Part 2 (Café OTO)” is a lighter proposition, easing in on a dronal feed and skating expanse. The glide of a reflective surface oscillated in yarbled abstraction, its many layers easing into play, overlapping, tensely roasted in the ripeness of that trumpet, flanked in bass guitar and abstract electrics while some hobo wanders the ruins. Rubbed and rolled collisions overtake contracting on an evocative bassline riff, a mirror-trapped conversation leaking into yawning frets in a bluesy blush that putrescently paws your imagination like a summery ampersand descending a taper-torn horizon.

Still Life With Apples is a gorgeous conspiracy worthy of your immediate attention.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-