Dolphin
Zvezda

"We hear the smell of grass, drink clouds, our souls are flowers, a river our memory..."

Even the Kraftwerk couldn't remain indifferent to the allure of the dry and angular sounds of the Russian language: "Ja tvój slugà ja tvój rabótnik": "I am your servant, I am your worker" is the Russian phrase that the Düsseldorf quartet elevates to the status of a slogan, both sonically, in "The Robots", and visually, reproduced on the back cover of "The Man-Machine". It is to be believed that this was not a random choice. There is indeed an undeniable correspondence between the sounds and the morphosyntactic structure of the Russian language and the result that Kraftwerk probably intended to achieve and communicate through their music. A synthetic language (not analytical, like Italian, for instance, where the syntactic connections between parts of speech are expressed by prepositions), Russian reduces and implodes the relationships between the members of the proposition.

Let's leave these linguistic considerations aside for a moment and move to Moscow, where there is a street called Arbat, roughly similar to our Porta Portese or Ponte Vecchio, where a boy, Andrey Lysikov, born on September 29, 1971, a blond, small and slim figure adorned with numerous tattoos, in the early nineties makes a living by selling matryoshkas. Favorite hobby: attending breakdance lessons. In 1992, he joins a rap group called Malchishnik and quickly becomes its charismatic leader, writing almost all the lyrics and music for the songs he performs with his voice (he would never consider himself a professional singer and would openly admit to not having a "musical ear"). The group under Lysikov's leadership records various LPs, repeatedly nearing a national sensation, due to the lyrics for which the black-and-white rectangle "Parental Advisory," if it had ever been applied to the CD cases, would serve only as a pale screen: Lysikov's lyrics are brimming with sex and foul language, a true scandal in a country like the Soviet Union that, creaking and resisting, has just begun the slow march toward reforms and still views the Western world, with its fashions and capital-consumeristic eccentricities, with suspicion and even fear.

Extreme experimenter, Lysikov is the first in Russia ever to record a CD reproducible simultaneously in Dolby Stereo, Dolby Digital, and DTS. The year is 2001, and the album is titled "Ja budu zhit'".

Last in a long series of solo albums, in 2004 Lysikov publishes "Zvezda", using on the cover the pseudonym Dolphin, which he had chosen for himself since the time of the ensemble Malchishnik. We had started to discuss this record by speaking about the synthesis of morphosyntactic elements that is favored by the structure of the Russian language. Well, the entire album documents the restless tension of its author reaching the creation of a work by reduction and subtraction. Lysikov-Dolphin throws like ballast from a hot air balloon, which otherwise would not take flight, any redundancy of words, images, sounds. A work of excavation in search of oneself, of one's inner universe. The discovery of what is truly important to him. The discovery of the Essential. Everything conspires to achieve this result, starting from the album cover, a quick pastel sketch by artist Yuri Kononenko. Essential the music: drum machine and a thread of acoustic guitar, very few keyboards, a handful of short melodies elaborated by computer.

The album starts with the roar of Karim Suvorov's percussion in "Sumerki", to continue with the sparse chords and the voice of Dolphin, uncertain, broken as if by an emotion rising in his throat. Dolphin gently lays his verses over the minimal sound outcomes of his laptop programs. He uses mass-produced loops, of which he is not at all jealous, so much so that he even places some of the bases on his website, freely available for visitors to use. Slightly, vaguely trip-hop rhythms. Voice used more to "speak" verses than to sing them. Rap non-rap. Not texts but poetry. Musically, the beginning of his songs is often quiet and reflective, usually opening up at the end, when suddenly other sounds besides the acoustic guitar, the drum machine, and the "singer's" voice light up.

In the texts of this album, Dolphin lingers in the exploration of themes that leave no room for smiles, for the sensations we expect to feel when listening to music: he speaks of sadness and death, of solitude and of infinitely folding into oneself, of violent, traumatic separations against one's will from the beloved woman, who is torn away by an adverse and unfathomable destiny. In "Romans", a track all veiled by a noise of strong wind and electric charges, beneath which we hear the drowned voice of Dolphin emerge, there are verses like these: "Tell her I love her / And that I die in separation from her / And that with my arms / I alone uplift her / To the distances of sunsets," or these, in "Imya": "The wind's fatigue screams with pain / A cry covers my throat / Listen, I weep for you / Tears consume me, I can do nothing else / Silence strangles me / How can it be, I lost you / Angels eat my soul / Quench their hunger / I am left alone. Cold".

What, however, saves from total despair is the detachment from a reality that rhetorical figures prevent from being recognized in its concreteness; synesthesias and metaphors place a veil of inscrutability between what is poetically imagined and what exists. At the end of the review, you can find the text, which I translated into Italian, of "Serebro" (in English: "Silver"). It is useless to state that the translation does not have the slightest pretense of rendering the poetic value of the text (at least, rhythm, rhymes, and the sound of the Russian language are irretrievably lost from the start). I hope, however, that it will be possible to grasp at least an example of the images used by the author. This text, in the pan-like transfiguration of the two lovers-raindrops, presents an interpretation of the theme Love-Death. I found it interesting because it offers a further insight into Dolphin's poetics, this time away from that negativity also present in other compositions of his. The lovers are, it is true, destined to end their earthly existence like two raindrops that dry up once they reach the ground. But destiny is cyclical. The lovers await a rebirth. No more death. And not just hope, but certainty.

To prevent the definitive plunge into the abyss of inescapable pessimism, the author's ability to create unsettling situations intervenes. Let's take, for example, the text of "Vesna". The song is all in five short verses ("We will surely meet, do you hear me / Forgive me / There, where I am going, it is spring / I know you will find me / Don't be alone"). Even if it is an appeal addressed to one's woman, once again, far away, the very rhythmic musical base with the massive (for once) accompaniment of the keyboards is extremely energetic, not hinting at psychological sufferings due to melancholic states. The short circuit of messages becomes even stronger if one accompanies listening to the song with the viewing of the video: archive images, in a frayed and suggestive Pal Color from the early days of color TV, showing clips from the opening ceremony of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. A child sleeps with their little head resting on their father's shoulder, who is sitting among the tens of thousands of spectators in the stands of the stadium where the ceremony is taking place; then, a long zoom on the smiling faces of young women who excitedly wave to a gigantic air-inflated puppet: the bear Misha, the mascot of the Moscow Olympics, soaring into the sky. Joy and celebration images: no space, here, for sadness and melancholy.

Then, we listen to two other remarkable tracks from this album, which are "MDMA", the only track, along with "Sumerki", where a "real" drum plays, and "Glaza", given as a bonus track, a duet with Stella Katsoudas, then a figure in the Chicago Techno-Experimental-Alternative scene, who had collaborated with Peter Gabriel, Trent Reznor, Corey Taylor, and is here co-author of the text sung by herself in English in the chorus and in Russian in the verses by Dolphin.

The listening of "Zvezda" risks transforming into a touching experience, capable of deeply marking the listener's sensitivity. These minimal sounds, these stylized melodies, produced by a young man just over thirty known as Dolphin, seated at his home table in front of a laptop, find easy access within us, pleasantly infect us, and don't leave anymore.

Note: The verses from the title of the review are taken from "Chuzhoy", track n. 3 of "Zvezda".

Credits: The idea to review this album came to me by reading this review: http://www.debaser.it/recensionidb/ID18347/Encre_Flux.htm based on entirely arbitrary and most likely undue mental transfers. Heartfelt thanks to Trellheim, author of the inspiring review!

 

Silver

You and I, two different drops of a single water

Tears of a cloud

We will shatter on the earth like crystals

Flying circles and swaying will separate us

The endless stretching downward

Rewarded by the look of the sun

Will bring intoxication to the grass

We will lie next to each other you and I

 

Or maybe we will fall on faces

They will wipe us from cheeks with hands

We will no longer be you and I little sister

The skin will dry with traces of water

Or maybe we will knock on window panes

With the heart of autumn

To awaken in us dormant pains

And it will happen with a silent cry of the soul

 

And they will not find us, you and I, all we are is water

We only have to await the silver of the rain

 

We will not touch the earth you and I

We will disappear in a burning flame

To wrap ourselves once again

In the soft silk of a dark blue banner

 

To rise once more

And to shower again

Just don't stay

Don't be buried in the ice of the eternal

 

And they will not find us, you and I, all we are is water

We only have to await the silver of the rain

 

Dolphin, "Zvezda", 2004 Universal Music Russia