kubikmaggi

saint petersburg

Adrift in quiet, distant mists / The stars swim in ordered choirs

Тихо плавают в тумане / Хоры стройные светил

Mikhail Lermontov, “The Demon” (1839)

Kubikmaggi are a trio from Saint Petersburg: Ksenya Fedorova (piano, vocals); Max Roudenko (bass guitar, melodica); and Ilya Varfolomeev (drums, percussion). Together they’re happy to tag themselves as avant-garde, free jazz, and minimalist. Throughout the band’s career, they’ve tended to rely on a single press release that serves them well in multiple languages. Translated from the Russian, it reads: “The members of Kubikmaggi have difficulty recollecting the dates of their career. They neglect their own chronology. In fact, they can barely count, given their frequent metrical experiments.”

The music of Kubikmaggi is indeed complex. It is so dismissive of generic boundaries on occasion that Federova, Roudenko, and Varfolomeev jokingly call themselves musical terrorists or jazz-punks. “We’re constantly experimenting on the line between instrumentation and pure expressiveness…. with a [great] concentration of ideas in every square inch of sheet music.”

And that brings us to their name, taken from a Swiss brand of stock cubes and thus a wordplay on the notion of “magic squares or cubes of sound. Any song by Kubikmaggi, if mixed correctly, could make a whole album of fully-fledged music.” To say more would mean to explain more…

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