Marina Tsvetaeva was rated as the hip-hoper of her time

The indie band Odnono has released a new album, in which the artist’s experience of the volumetric events of our time is surprisingly clearly imprinted. “Flowers of the Invisible World” is the name of the disc, but the “flowers” ​​turned out to be few, only seven new compositions, but to be honest, without passage songs for volume, for which special thanks. One of the compositions of the album “Du-sha” is dedicated to the 130th anniversary of Marina Tsvetaeva, whose work inspires the author and frontman of Odnono Alexei Myshkin. The musician spoke about working on the album in an interview for ZD.

– Why the poems of Marina Tsvetaeva?

— I have a project called Upanishads of Russian Poetry, in which I compare and combine Russian classics with the most ancient verses in Sanskrit. Tsvetaeva’s texts are often heard in this project, I have a close relationship with her, her poems are very close to me. She is rhythmic, she was engaged in sound recording, she is the best hip-hoper of those times … I sit one day and just look through her texts on spiritual topics, and our guitarist Nail (Nail Kuramshin. – Approx. ed.) sends me the music to which I wanted write a track. I turn on the track and see how these verses by Tsvetaeva naturally fall on her. And at the same moment, inside myself, I heard this song in its entirety in finished form, I even heard this mantra, which was sung in my head by the famous Indian singer Bittu Mallik (who eventually sang it). There sounds “shanti”-mantra, this ancient text from the Rig Veda (the verse is more than 7 thousand years old) speaks of calmness. Moreover, Bittu sings this “shanti”, calmness, which is not calm at all. It turned out to be such an aggressive call for the calmness of all beings on this planet. Now there are conflicts everywhere, and we wanted to speak on this topic.

– Probably the most poignant song in the album is “Mom”. You wrote it after your mom passed away last year. And although the music is flooded with light, it is difficult to listen to it without tears …

– Often those who hear this song respond in a similar way. The whole album turned out to be really very naked in terms of revealing my personal experiences. Yesterday we shot a video for the song “Mama”, a simple clip, nothing special, I decided to sit down in the studio and tell this story. And you have no idea how difficult it was for me. Reading this song is always a pain. Such an album turned out, the songs of which are difficult to perform, because there are a lot of memories, emotions, too much personal. This song came out of me naturally, and I thought that if my mother, even without being here, could somehow touch the hearts of people, it would be very good. She had a big heart, she was a loving person.

— This is your eighth full-length album and it has 8 tracks. Was it specially planned?

— I thought over its sound, it is similar to synth-pop, such analog electronics, I wanted this synth-sound. This was the original concept. I have long wanted to hear such deep basses in our music, these beats are fashionable. Our drummer Danila helped a lot with this, he became one of the main producers of the album. In general, I love concepts, I don’t like albums that are born just from a hodgepodge of tracks written in a certain period. For example, our last album “Alone” was similar to the work of The Cinematic Orchestra. Then I listened to them, rode a bicycle around my village, listened to them and really wanted us to sound like them. And there are two songs made right under them, with an orchestra, violins, similar drums.

– Did you get into the program of the last Moscow Film Festival with your animation clip? A chain of coincidences?

— We sent the clip “Invulnerable” to various music and animation channels. And one girl, the channel’s editor, liked it very much, but it didn’t fit into the channel’s format, and she said that she couldn’t pass by, because it was really a very serious job. It turned out that she is engaged in the selection for the MIFF. So we entered the program, out-of-competition so far, but still. It turned out that animation as a genre, as a phenomenon, is participating in the festival program this year for the first time. And we got there right away! It’s incredible. The clip is made in a rather unconventional animation manner combined with real footage. Russian animators did this as early as the beginning of the 20th century, but it was forgotten and rediscovered in the West at the very end of the same century and presented as a sensation, as usual. Now the animators have gone even further. The clip was not rendered frame by frame, as usual, it was animated by a neural network under the direction of director Pavel Egorov. And our group, working on this clip, stepped into an adjacent branch of pop culture, which happens regularly, but is rarely highly appreciated by professionals from a parallel creative environment. With Odnono, that very rare case happened when ordinary viewers liked it, and professionals appreciated it.

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In terms of content, the album “Flowers of the Invisible World” really consistently and rather conceptually flows from one topic to another: from death to freedom, and ends with an exit to immortality with the text “Soul Sha” by Marina Tsvetaeva. But there are also hidden and non-obvious centers around which the record spins, for example, a line from the track “Revolution”: “Here I am – without special effects and filters.”

Published in the newspaper “Moskovsky Komsomolets” No. 28883 dated October 5, 2022

Newspaper headline:
Pain and tears poured into the album “One But”