Live at Hidden Agenda

The first minute recalls the legacy of the American group Earth, with their blues-tinged ambient, but everything falls into place as soon as Borisov begins to whisper, sing and pronounce something in his favourite manner, long familiar to everyone interested in experimental music. Here a half-heard line, there just incoherent babbling, and at some point the words of "Acid" start to emerge — a song by Notchnoi Prospekt, Borisov's project, active since the mid-eighties. While Alexei handles vocals and guitar, Olga sets rhythmic structures whose roots can be found in the psychedelic rock of the seventies and in the New York no wave of the early eighties. Torn, confused drum loops are combined with a constant pulsation, with audibly varied dynamics and stop-time. In the end it all conveys a sense of limited freedom, in which the musicians deliberately break the frame, trying to create improvisational and fragmented near-song structures only to destroy them at once and start building again.