foresteppe
berdsk
Pleasure may grow in unkempt forests / ––and happiness on oceans’ edge. / Harmony may break in waves / That run upon some empty shore
Есть наслаждение и в дикости лесов, / Есть радость на приморском бреге, / И есть гармония в сем говоре валов, / Дробящихся в пустынном беге
Konstantin Batyushkov (1819)
Berdsk is a large town in southern Siberia, over 1,700 miles from Moscow. It was founded primarily by peasants in the Seventeenth Century, looking to escape cruel urban dictates. Here lives Egor Klochikhin, who records hushed tape music under the pseudonym Foresteppe. His is a key contributor to the Siberian Klammklang collective, while also composing for installations and exhibitions. His chosen organization and label declare their intention to “turn margins into junctions by bringing together musical peripheries.”
Klammklang celebrates the work of Foresteppe as “conceptual tape collages made of pieces, splices, and overlapping layers from semi-anonymous Soviet-era home recordings.” Spatial distance fosters an audible equivalent.
In terms of an overarching worldview, Klochikhin quotes the Russian composer Vladimir Martynov from 2014: “Human improvement is a matter of private change; no public equivalent will lead to anything. It’s time to stop all these public, social ‘transformations’ that were so common in the Twentieth Century. It’s time to start our own private ‘perestroika.’”