"Legendary Russian group who operate on the fringes of noise, pop and
improvisation. Their instrumental sound is built out of specially
amplified metal debris, fused with brittle guitar distortion and
disturbing voice overs. They generate a level of spiritual intensity
which could only emanate from the old "East".
CHRIS CUTLER
"...Carmina Moriturorum recorded together with Ensemble Opus Posth represents rather an extraordinary CD...
...It’s more like a cantata: the symphony sound is flavoured with industrial noises extracted from Sudnick’ metal objects...
...Vera Ogareva’s (ex-“Iva-Nova”) sings solemnly in dead latine which makes an amazing impression. Her low ominous voice recalls of Niko or Diamanda Galass in low registers...
...The ideas for Carmina’s dark compositions derived from the End of Rome Impire. The compositions have a ponderous gait as in Laibach’s Mackbet..."
ROLLING STONES, Jan. 2008
"Zga, an industrial group from S.-Peterburg and Moscow Ensemble Opus Posth targets at the Eternity…
Nick Sudnick, Zga’s art director, wrote the whole score for the strigs, voice, trombon and noise - meanwhile, a unique experience...
..."
AFISHA, Jan. 2008
"As cosy and home-like as a Rostock satellite town."
"ZAP"
"Zga's direct uncompromising approach carries a devastating emotional
clout...their extraordinary power peaks into intense monolithic
pulses."
"THE WIRE"
ZGAMONIUMS
Excerpt from the book "Orbitones, Spoon Harps & Bellowphones",
published by Ellipsis Arts.
Nick Soudnick is the founder of the musical group ZGA, and the maker of the
sound instruments he refers as Zgamoniums. He's been joined in ZGA over the
years by a changing cast of group members, musical guests and friends. The
group started in Riga, Latvia in 1984. There, living and practicing in a
crowded apartment building, the musicians found themselves unable play aloud
for fear of disturbing neighbors. Much of ZGA's music -- you'll understand
this when you listen to their track on the accompanying CD -- is forceful and
robust in nature; not the sort of stuff you play at low volume. So Nick took
to contact-miking his sound sources in a way that turned a small acoustic
sound within the room into a big sound -- big not only in volume, but in
feeling -- in the wires, in the headphones, on the recording tape.
In 1991 Nick left Latvia for St. Petersburg, partly in order to take advantage
of opportunities that had opened up there for better practice space and
recording facilities. Noise restrictions would no longer be such a problem.
But the contact mics, and -- more to the point -- the particular sound
qualities he had learned to coax out of them, remained an essential part of
ZGA's music.
That music is characterized by a big, resonant, echoey sound, rough and edgy,
and still, at times, finely delineated and delicate. Much of it is
aggressively noisy, while some is peaceful and rather beautiful. Mixed in
with the big industrial sounds are passages of plinky, scratchy stuff, or tiny
insect-like noises. Some of the music has clear tonal centers and moments of
melody, while some is made entirely of sounds without pitch. The unpitched
pieces have the feeling of abstract paintings -- the sort where you sense in
the relations of shape and color that the artist is onto something, even if
you can't say what.
Nick occasionally plays clarinet or accordion in addition to the instruments
that he has made, and in some pieces his dark voice breaks the surface. Toy
reeds, whistles, combs and such find their way in as well. Electric guitar and
bass may be present, and in the hands of some very skilled players too -- but
played in a manner closely allied to the sound qualities of the zgamoniums.
So what are these instruments that Nick makes?
They are mostly metal objects, made from scrap. "When I find something that
could be interesting for sound," Nick says, "I take it with me. And I have
many, many, many of these kinds of things in my workshop." For several of the
instruments, a primary sounding element is coil springs of steel. They may be
stretched between bars in a steel frame, or across the surface of a table-
like structure. Sometimes several springs of different weights and diameters
are joined together, or connected with musical strings. Musical strings may
also be attached separately, alongside the springs. In one instrument an old
wooden zither, well-worn but seemingly whole, sits conspicuously among the
other attachments. The strings and springs can be plucked, scraped, struck or
bowed.
Other zgamoniums employ plates of steel or other metals. These come in all
kinds of found-object shapes, and they're mounted in different ways --
sometimes separately suspended, leaving them free to vibrate, sometimes held
rigidly, sometimes attached fast to each other or else loosely fixed so that
they can rattle together. One of the instruments has many smaller, thicker
metal plates or disks supported on heavy springs mounted on a wooden table.
Springs and metal plates in general are alike in this respect: both have
relatively little acoustic damping, and they tend to produce sustained, multi-
frequency resonances. When many different springs and strings and plates are
joined together, as they are in the zgamoniums, they interact to produce
especially complex, multi-faceted resonating systems. Everything is connected,
all the parts share their vibrations and serve as soundboards for each other.
To the ear the results are, in a sense, chaotic -- no simple, harmonious pitch
relationships here -- but chaotic, in the ZGA player's hands, in gritty and
always interesting ways.
"Most important," Nick maintains, "are the special piezo elements." These are
the contact mics which, he says, impart a distinctive character to the
amplified sound. The ones he uses were not designed for musical purposes.
They are used in Russia as a type of signaling device, sending a single
electrical impulse when, for instance, a piece of glass to which they had been
attached is broken. But on an instrument, Nick says, "they work like a pickup,
and a very interesting pickup." Each instrument is wired with several of
them, attached at selected locations on the body and sounding elements of the
instrument to pick up the different resonances.
The zgamoniums often undergo changes, with Nick reconfiguring them for
different pieces of music or different musical effects. He doesn't care about
looks, he says. It's just the sound he's after; that and the convenience of
portability. Yet some people who've seen ZGA in performance comment have
described the visual effect as riveting. As one concert-goer remarked, "they
looked like a scrap yard up there."
"Back to the East," the ZGA piece included on the accompanying CD, was
recorded in St. Petersburg in 1995. Nick is joined here by musicians Scarlett
and Michael Judenich playing a variety of sound objects and instruments. The
recording is dedicated to Alexander Zhylin, an essential part of ZGA for many
years, who had died tragically, earlier in 1994.
Bart Hopkin
THE WIRE
the original unedited version
Excerpted from an article at Tamizdat.org
The sound of ZGA's improv noise is like a metaphor of the late Soviet or post-Soviet everyday life: rusty, broken-down, unpleasantly dominated by cold metal, functioning to seemingly inpenetrable, absurd logic. ZGA is the first still active Russian noise group, started in 1984. Nick Sudnick, its sole remaining member from the original line-up, is another of those dozens of St. Petersburg musicians who at some point played also in Pop Mechanics. I meet him in his workshop in the center of St. Petersburg. The workshop is, naturally enough, filled with beautiful primitive Soviet electronics and junk iron objects. Throughout the interview, Sudnick keeps soldiering together parts of his junk-iron instruments, "zgamoniums". The day before ZGA has performed at the fourth annual memorial festival of Sergei Kuryokhin, in front of an extremely warm and welcoming audience. Kraut-rockers Faust also performed, and they are coming to visit and have a jam session at Sudnick's workshop on the next day.
ZGA's music has developed on a trajectory of its own. While the sound of their first mid-80's recordings was a lot like any home-made distort-o-industria, their roots in the 70's prog were discernible post factum from riffs and rhythms they used. The Western industrial/noise influences - Nurse with Wound, Factrix, Mnemonists - reached them only somewhat later, during perestroika, when Sudnick started to build his zgamoniums. The zgamoniums, which ZGA uses both on stage and in studio, are contact-miked springs hammered with mallets, metal sheets gently stroked with medieval-looking miniature whips, strings attached to brutally constructed iron grids, and much more. "We realized we could never play as well and skillfully as the Western people we admired. At that point it became clear that we had to find something of our own, a language of our own. So in late -87 I started to build my own instruments."
After three cd's released in the first half of the 90's on Chris Cutler's ReR Megacorp label, ZGA has released only cassettes on Alexander Lebedev-Frontov's Ultra imprint. Like it happened with many other Russian underground musicians, their Western concert trips all but ended at about the same time, when the interest in Russia, born during the Gorby years, had run its course. After that Sudnick has put his efforts on several side projects in to his old band, but now interest in ZGA may be on the rise again. Their first cd release in six years, The Flight of Infection, due out soon on the small US label Tariff.
"Basically I like what has happened in Russia after the collapse of the USSR, that the society has become more open, even though they are now trying to strangle the media again. On the other hand, many people, including me, didn't guess that everyday life would get this difficult. Artists and musicians are unable to earn any money, because their products just don't interest anyone in the situation where the average income of the population keeps on falling all the time."
"But I don't have any clear-cut political opinions. I think Dugin [this interview was done before Dugin became influential in state politics] is an interesting author, and I see the work of Alexander [Lebedev-Frontov's, with whom Sudnick plays as a duo under the project name Vetrophonia] work as good-natured, healthy humour. I don't take it as seriously as those blockheads in the National Bolshevik Party."
In recent years ZGA has discarded the remnants of their silly prog wackiness, and at the same time melodic motifs have become more noticeable in their music in the form of Sudnick's simple electric organ sounds, making it sound like nothing else. "I studied accordeon when I was a teenager. I learned the standard Soviet accordeon repertoire: a bit of classical, a bit of folk stuff. It was boring, but I dreamed that with my accordeon skills I could one day get a chance to play on an Ionika, the Soviet electric organ of the late 60's." The best moments of ZGA's current live set are difficult to place into any exact time and place. With Ekaterina Fiodorova on metal percussion, Ramil Shamsutdinov on trombone and Sudnick playing zgamoniums, tapes and accordion, the band looks and sounds like a science fiction band led by Tom Waits from a film that Tarkovsky never made. Or almost like an imaginary factory orchestra in the late 1920's, equally interested in noise music of the time and the melodicism of Shostakovich.
Hungarian journalist Rene Filip-Miller was a rare foreign witness of the original version of this music in the early 1920's. His account from 1926 is particularly valuable, because unlike Italian Futurists' noise music - the Delta blues of contemporary industrial music, as I think somebody has called it - the Russian Engineerists were afterwards almost wiped out of Soviet history:
"The Bolshevists very soon proceeded to construct special noise instruments, to form noise orchestras, to give the public a 'real new music', instead of the usual old bourgeois individualistic 'patchwork', and in this way to prepare the collective soul for the revelation of the holiest. They imitated all conceivable sounds from industry and technology and united them in peculiar fugues, in which a whole world of noise deafened the ear. [...] A particularly fanatical sect of 'machine worshippers', the so-called 'engineerists', held in the festive hall of the Moscow Trade Union Palace noise orgies which show better than anything else the absurdity of all these attempts. The first public divine service of these 'machine worshippers' began with a noise orchestra composed of a crowd of motors, turbines, hooters and similar instruments of din. [...] This was a passion play which represented the sacrifice of the lower individual man on the altar of the mechanized and desouled collectivity."
