Valentina Goncharova’s luminous output offers a window into a lesser-known Soviet history of experimental music, drawing from classical, jazz, and new age electronic sounds behind the iron curtain. Born in 1953 in Kyiv, Ukraine, Goncharova moved to Leningrad (now St Petersburg) at age 16, studying classical violin and contemporary composition at the Leningrad Conservatory, but experienced a revelation at a free jazz concert by the Ganelin Trio in the 1970s. Now set on a path towards the homemade and avant garde, she became involved in the underground rock scene and later married an engineer named Igor Zubkov who built her a modified electric violin. They moved to Tallinn, Estonia, bought a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and began making DIY electroacoustic music, recording household objects with contact mics, and according to one source, building a drum kit from pencils.
The first volume of Goncharova’s enveloping music came out in 2020 on Estonian label Shukai; the second brings together duets with late Finnish experimental musician Pekka Airaksinen, theatre director and instrumentalist Alexander Aksenov and Russian composer Sergey Letov. The focus is on the remarkable music they made together, self-recorded in jams at home, in jazz cafes, apartments and studios in Tallinn, Riga, Helsinki and Moscow between 1987 and 1991.
The spiritual Reincarnation II with Aksenov is the standout – it arrives as if waking from a dream, a gauzy dance with Goncharova’s voice wheeling like a bird. Pieces with Letov play with sound as texture – raindrops, and a conversation in which a violin pleads like a child and reeds reply gently, as if in appeasement. With Airaksinen the music is jaunty and off-kilter in the three tracks of compellingly unusual synthesiser jams. All the recordings give the feeling that we are listening in on private play and exchange. It is music made for personal pleasure; as exploration, and therein lies its magnetism.
Also out this month
Elsewhere, the excellent future ethnography series Antologia de Música Atípica Portuguesa wraps up with its third volume Canto Devocinário (Discrepant), capturing music by contemporary Portuguese artists drawing on ceremonial vocal sources used alongside drum machines and synths. Gospel et le Râteau (Bisou Records) collects unreleased work by the late Ghédalia Tazartès from across his career, with raunchy chanson, bizarre collage and his distinctive and visionary vocal style, closing with a sung text by Antonin Artaud. Finally, perhaps the first album inspired by a character from TV show Law and Order. Eiko Ishibashi’s For McCoy (Black Truffle) is not as daft as it sounds. It is dominated by slowly unfurling soundscapes for flute, voice, electronics and sax, with an easy, earwormy jazz number for when the credits roll.
• This column’s regular author, John Lewis, is away.
