Thunder of victory: "Cinema" throws lightning, Ay Yola conquers the world

October is the perfect time to prepare for winter, so cheerful, warming music from various regions of the Earth, ranging from Bashkir ethno-techno and Tajik pop to New York avant-garde and St. Petersburg rock, will be more welcome than ever. Izvestia — about the most interesting albums of October that you might have missed for some reason.

Ay Yola

Ural Batyr

The Ufa trio thundered with the track Homay, which suddenly became an international hit, back in the spring. And finally, a full-fledged debut album. Adeoy, Rinat and Ruslan transform Bashkir melodies into something between an industrial mystery and an ambient opera. This is an epic post-techno in which archaism collides with the synthetic sound of the 21st century — monotonous percussion sounds like the blows of a blacksmith's hammer, sampled drones of kylkobyz intertwine with the trills of a live kurai flute, measured dombra chords set the rhythm.

The main strength of the group lies in its ability to connect the local with the universal. Where other folklore electronics projects tend towards museum reconstruction, Ay Yola is building a living organism: shamanism meets techno, steppe meets industry, and heroic myth is an internal crisis of modernity. There are echoes of M83 and the spirit of Nordic darkwave in this fusion, but everything is translated into the language of the Urals — hard, melancholic, genuinely earthy. This is original and producer—driven music in the good sense of the word, which was desperately lacking on the domestic stage, where in recent years outspoken epigones competed with tiresome amateurs.

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"Cinema"

"Lightning of Indra"

The decision of Kino to re-use the preserved recordings of Tsoi's voice for new and old songs inevitably provoked an ambivalent reaction from the band's fans (and 80 percent of Russian-speaking residents of the former USSR aged 20 to 60 can be safely attributed to these). For young people, who, in fact, did not find the legendary line-up during the singer's lifetime and adopted "kinomania" from their parents and older siblings, this is a completely legitimate way to continue the existence of the band in a new, "virtual" reality. The "old people" who remember the triumphant concerts of the late 80s and carefully store cassettes with "real" recordings, of course, the question arises, "Why all this?".

The obvious answer is "everyone needs to eat," however, it disappears pretty quickly as you listen to "Lightning". Tsoi's early songs were selected for the album, which are generally well known only to the most dedicated fans. The arrangements are made without a museum reverence for the works of the late 80s - this is no longer a gloomy and cheerful new wave, but something closer to refined pop—rock, with atmospheric synthesizers, brass, violin and airy backing vocals. There was also hooliganism — for example, in "You tricked me around your finger" the hit Dead Or Alive (one of the favorite bands of the original drummer of "Cinema" Georgy "Gustav" Guryanov) is quoted. In general, it is not without surprise that we see the new album of the legendary band in front of us, and not just a collection of remakes, which, alas, were the previous two attempts ("This is not Love (Remake 2024)" and "12_22").

"Picnic quintet"

"Picnic Suite" for guitar, flute and jazz trio"

Juggling styles in our time already causes either fatigue or bewilderment — and not only in music (have you been tempted to visit a restaurant with fusion cuisine for a long time?). And against this background, the Moscow Picnic Quintet suddenly records the Picnic Suite by Frenchman Claude Bolling and reminds us why such experiments are needed at all. French elegance and Baroque discipline, jazz freedom and academic precision really merged here in friendly harmony and ease, as befits a good picnic.

Bolling, the patriarch of French jazz, is more familiar to the general public as a film composer who has composed music for more than a hundred films over his long life, including such memorable hits of the European screen as "Borsalino", "Magnificent" and "Passengers". He composed this suite in 1980 as a dialogue of guitar and flute with a jazz trio. In the version of the Picnic Quintet, everything sounds cleaner, warmer, like a restored watercolor: Dmitry Andreev's guitar is dry and transparent, Juliana Padalko's flute is light and a little dreamy, Olga Zaikina's piano keeps its shape, and the rhythm section sets a soft impulse, not allowing the music to freeze.

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Sylvie Courvoisier, Wadada Leo Smith

Angel Falls

The fruit of the joint work of two outstanding figures of the New York improvisational scene quite clearly explains to the laymen that real maestros have perfect musical freedom always limited by strict academicism of performance. Swiss pianist Sylvie Courvosier, who has long settled in New York, has developed a style that combines the discipline of the European school and the avant-garde impulse of free jazz. Vadada Leo Smith, one of the main ideologists of "creative music", uses the trumpet concisely and effectively, emphasizing Courvosier's piano passages.

The eight tracks of the album are not compositions in the strict sense of the word. Rather, these are the meditative states of musicians, recorded with the help of sound recordings and presented to a world that is not always ready to understand them. It is not only (and not even so much) the sounds that are important here, but the pauses between them that generate new musical meanings through silence. At the same time, "Angel Falls" does not go into the field of musical "zaumi" and remains quite accessible to perception and unfamiliar with serious modern music by the listener — the main thing is not to be afraid.

Mahfirat Khamrakulova

"Melodies of love" ("Sozi Ishq")

The Melodiya company continues to extract amazing artifacts from Soviet times from its archives. Now it's time for the main star of Soviet Tajikistan, Mahfirat Khamrakulova (who celebrated her 70th birthday this year), who in the 80s was both a symbolic "liberated woman of the East" and a source of pride for her compatriots - so they have their own, original, but modern pop singer. Khamrakulova started out as a soloist with the Gulshan ensemble, the main pop group in the republic, where she received a solid education — today her solo recordings, where European orchestration accompanies Central Asian melodies, and newfangled synthesizers accompany folk instruments, are surprisingly fresh and professionally listened to.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the outbreak of the civil war in Tajikistan, Khamrakulova left her native Dushanbe, moving first to Moscow, and then emigrated overseas. However, she did not give up her singing career and still continues to perform - both in New York, in front of a fairly large diaspora, and in her homeland, where, as they say, her concerts are invariably accompanied by sold—out shows. The collection of the best recordings from the early 80s clearly explains the reasons for such a loyal love of the audience - even without understanding the words, it's hard not to get into these languid ballads and relaxed pop action movies with the flavor of the oriental bazaar.