Olive Mess
Cherdak

THE REVIEW

Are you ready to overturn every image that runs through your head about music? Are you ready to take King Crimson and have them marry the Beatles, with Pierluigi da Palestrina, with Mozart, with Henry Cow, with Hatfield and The North and Dün? If you are ready, it's a good start, but just a start, because in reality, you have to prepare for much more. This incredible group comes from Latvia and was formed in 1998 around a brilliant bassist named Denis Arsenin, who collided (quite the coincidence, huh?) with drummer Edgar Kempish. In 2002, they debuted with Solei Zeuhl with the album "Gramercy", a rather experimental and interesting yet crazy album, in its Crimsonian, Zeuhl, and Gentle Giant unions.

After all this silence, the visionary patron of Mellow Records, Mr. Mauro Moroni, fishes these olives in brine out of the barrel and, in 2008, releases a wonderful musical carousel called "Cherdak". The title in Latvian means "attic" and that's precisely where we need to go rummage to find and open the four chests that represent the four lengthy titles of the work. In the chests, we can find everything and be surprised by nothing, in fact, we must simply take, observe, and store: from the oldest to the most modern of things. Imagine, for instance, picking a 1600 Provençal score and playing it with Fripp's Gibson, as in the suite "Tombeau de Cherdak", or a Beatles' arpeggio and introducing it into a polymetric time signature, just to provide fun and joy to the kids waving in an aged photo of the carousel, as we can hear in "Beowulf". We can find texts in Latin or Shakespearean English, and it's likely they are so ancient that they crumble in your hands; then we could watch the fragments slowly fall into the chest to insert into a new score two centuries more modern, escaping through a time-space curve.

No minor task for the two guitarists Alexey and Sergey Syomin, proudly showing off among electric, acoustic, classical, baroque, while they create the sharp edges of a container to be filled with organs and keyboards by the brilliant Elizabeth Perecz and with the crazy and intricate rhythms of the aforementioned Kempish.

What is expressed in this album is enormous and hints at the real possibilities of those musical mixtures that can be born in the exceptional minds of those who still want to experiment, without being frightened by big words like avant-garde and progressive.

The album is easily retrievable directly from the San Remo label, and I highly recommend it for 55 minutes of musical enjoyment, anomalous, strange, ancient and modern, yet incredibly exciting.

Siouletta.