Even a cheerfully depressive bad cop like me finally throws up his hands when he is inundated by the flood of extremely wretched news that has been coming from his usual beats this past week, especially after the short perfect summer of the last three weeks has suddenly turned to nonstop rain and gloom in this forgotten corner of the former Russian Empire.
So I am going try something newish on this weblog and introduce all you Russian readers to a band I have only just discovered today.
Lucidvox are four young women from Moscow who play psychedelic music with a touch of Krautrock. The group was formed in autumn 2013 after a hiking trip to Cape Fiolent. Originally, it was an instrumental quartet. Anna, the vocalist, played the flute, but then began to sing as well.
In July 2013, the band released the EP Drugoi chelovek (Another Man). In the following year, the group actively concertized.
On June 3, 2014, Lucidvox released the full-length album V Dvizhenii (In Movement), which the magazine Afisha-Volna listed among its top twenty Russian albums of the year.
Currently, Lucidvox are mixing an EP. They are planning to present the EP and a video to the one of the songs in early spring.
source: musicmama.ru
You can listen to all or nearly all of their back catalogue on their SoundCloud page, and listen to new tracks and keep up with their touring schedule and other goings-on on their VKontakte page (in Russian).
I know what kind of escapism and hipsterism this smacks of, comrades, but such borrowed escape valves and pretty exercises in youthful self-deception are at least as much a part of Russia’s currently violently “apolitical” political landscape as the regime’s out-and-out awfulness and the stunning heroism of the country’s so far badly outnumbered and outgunned activists and political prisoners.
And who knows what funny dreams of living somewhere and somewhen better and fairer are bound up in secondhand but enchanting music like this?
In any case, the sound couldn’t fit the current zeitgeist any better.
Lucidvox played a live set for Audiotree Worldwide, on February 8, 2021
Alina Yevseyeva (vocals, keyboards), Nadezhda Samodurova (percussion), Anna Moskvitina (bass), and Galla Gintovt — aka Lucidvox — talked to the 17:55 Sessions in December 2020, and played three songs for them as well.
UPDATE (March 24, 2021). Earlier this month, Lucidvox released a new album, We Are, which you can listen to (and order a copy of!) here and here. || THC
The Russian Reader 