Recording mixtapes has been a wonderful coping mechanism for me since I was 12 years old. It is a creative outlet. Using other people’s art to make your own. Each song is a puzzle piece, and you put them together to make your own larger picture. So in times like these, I burn MP3s onto CDs (recording music straight off the radio these days really is kind of obsolete), and from that source, record mixtapes.
I made a mixtape of only Armenian music the day the war ended, consisting of some of my favorites both old and new, plus the new System of a Down songs (which given the catastrophic results of the war, are now kind of sad to listen to; it was only a few days after their release that they became dated. In fact, just as an aside, even though it was less than a week ago if I were doing my Top 3 Songs of the Month now they would be completely different. Everything has changed quickly). The mix was called Հավիտյան Հայ (Havityan Hye; “Forever Armenian”). That’s not really the tape I will be writing about here, but I figured I would at least mention it. I recorded it in a state of shock, so it probably isn’t my most well-constructed mixtape. Plus, I like to construct Spotify playlists to show off my mixes if I am going to blog about it, and I highly doubt a lot of the songs on that tape are on Spotify. No, I suppose I might be the only person who will ever listen to that mixtape, unless my son ever takes an interest in my mixes.
A few days passed after I recorded that mix. I had a lot of music I wanted to put on a mix since early October which did not fit the theme of the Armenian tape, so I just went ahead and did it, disregarding my usual “one mixtape a month” rule, which is only there so I don’t burn through my limited supply of blank tapes, or end up spending more time recording mixtapes than listening to them (I recorded around 40 mixtapes from 2000 to 2001 in my early days of making mixtapes, and decided I needed some self control). My newest mixtape is titled Սեւ Օրեր (Sev Orer; “Black Days”). While there are four Armenian songs on it, mainly it consists of European and American darkwave and coldwave music, with a couple minor exceptions. Regardless of genre, they all convey my mood as of late, in these black days, with most of Artsakh being sceded to Azerbaijan, watching as the citizens of Artsakh leave their homeland in exodus, burning their houses down before they leave lest they fall into enemy hands; a final “fuck you” to this ethnic cleansing. Maybe it doesn’t affect me personally, but I was still devastated. The Germans call this feeling “Weltschmerz”. The world just seems like a dark, terrible and miserable place, devoid of justice, ruled by “famine, pestilence, war, disease and death”, as Vincent Price’s character Prince Prospero put it in Masque of the Red Death. The glass isn’t just half empty, it is completely empty, and we were lied to by the people in charge of the world that there would be water in the glass. I wish I didn’t understand the world as well as I do. I wish I could go back to being innocent and ignorant. I wish I had stayed in Plato’s cave and that I still believed the shadows on the wall were real. But I can’t go back. In spite of everything, I still would like to repatriate to Armenia someday. But, in any case it doesn’t seem likely that I will ever be visiting Shushi again, among other parts of Artsakh. I really visited Artsakh during the good times, back in 2015. I may have to do a super depressing blog entry at some point and share my pictures of the trip, knowing that most of the buildings in the pictures have been bombed out and destroyed by now.
A band that really conveys my feelings well in the past week or so is the Belarussian darkwave band Molchat Doma, one of the central figures of the “doomer” movement online, and a fixture on “Russian Doomer Music” playlists on YouTube and elsewhere. They have three songs on this mixtape, tying them with The Deenjes. Yes, I recently learned that Generation Z’s meme culture has a name for people like me, with pessimistic outlooks on the world, human nature and the future of humanity, and that is doomer. Not to be confused with boomer or zoomer. Doomer music isn’t really a true music genre, yet anyway, since it is basically darkwave or post-punk. Perhaps in the same way “goth” isn’t a real music genre, just an umbrella term that is useful for explaining dark music genres to the general public. But much like the genre of synthwave, aka retrowave, represents a certain 1980’s aesthetic (neon city lights, sunsets, VHS picture quality, the colors pink and blue on everything), the doomer aesthetic, at least of the Russian variety, is decaying Soviet-era buildings (especially abandoned sites like Chernobyl and Pripyat) set to slow, melancholic electronic and guitar-based music with low, droning vocals. It is the decaying empty promises of a bygone era, lamenting a glorious future that never came. To a degree, it is similar to steampunk and synthwave in that aspect. It’s an energy I really felt in Vanadzor, Armenia too actually, with its abandoned Soviet factories. Maybe that is why it speaks to me. I can understand disillusioned people from post-Soviet countries, at least in a way most people born in America probably can’t. In any case, Molchat Doma tends to blend well with Forever Grey, Selofan, Tearful Moon, and other bands I am into right now from Europe and the US. So this isn’t really a whole Russian doomer tape (I may make one eventually), but that kind of energy permeates throughout the mix.
I also took it upon myself to become familiarized with the discography of The Deenjes in the aftermath of the war. They are an underground Armenian band, closest I could ever find to Armenian goth music (I know, goth isn’t a real music genre). But they adhere to no one genre. I have mentioned them on this blog before, here’s an article about them if you’re curious. They’re nowhere to be found on Spotify; they have a page but it seems none of the tracks are playable. Nor Bandcamp for that matter. But that is because they purposely release their music for free, and have never released a proper album, instead uploading their music on YouTube and declaring their album “Mother Tongue”, an ongoing project.
Another goodie included on the tape is Ayria’s new single “Battle Cry”. I’m excited for her new album whenever it comes out, she’s an old favorite of mine going back to 2009. Also present twice on the tape to add their morose levity is Slow Danse With the Dead. Their track “If One Coffin Lid Shuts Another Shall Open” is almost motivational; comforting in its own darkly sarcastic way. The final song is “Fell on Black Days” by Soundgarden. It is the partial namesake of the mix, but is unlike the other songs, being a 90s grunge song. It’s another one of those songs that laid dormant in my brain for years until current events brought it back again. Just something I used to hear on the radio as a kid.
Anyway, to the point of this post, here is the playlist. I will link to the songs not on Spotify to YouTube.
Side A
Molchat Doma - Volny
Forever Grey - Downpour
SEVIT - Love or Madness
Selofan - Absolutely Absent
Minuit Machine - To Control
Fearing - Good Talks
Tearful Moon - Love You More Than Death
Molchat Doma - Zvezdy
Diabol Strain - Neptuno
Side B
Forever Grey - Labour of Death
Slow Danse with the Dead - The Heat
Diavol Strain - Todo el Caos Habita Aqui
Selofan - 4 a.m.
Ayria - Battle Cry
Molchat Doma - Sudno
Tearful Moon - Be Reborn
Slow Danse With the Dead - If One Coffin Lid Shuts Another Shall Open
Soundgarden - Fell on Black Days
No comments:
Post a Comment