Baba Vanga

This overview of the fantastic Czech tape label Baba Vanga dates from August 2017. Originally commissioned for the excellent Glissando magazine, it vanished into a publishing black hole soon after. It is reproduced here, in my preferred version, for your interest and pleasure.

Baba Vanga has put out several more excellent tapes since I finished this piece – so head over to the label’s Bandcamp and dive into their gloomy, compelling world.

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Prague-based tape label Baba Vanga exemplifies the cross-cultural exchanges that typify the contemporary sonic underground. Since 2013, it has pursued a wide-ranging release strategy encompassing bruised techno, corroded industrial rituals, algorithmic rave deconstructions and brain-grating audio collage. And although its roster draws mainly from central Europe’s current experimental diaspora – Budapest, Moscow, Bucharest, Belgrade and Tallinn are all points on the Baba Vanga map, as well as its native city – outliers from Tokyo and London add still more flavours to the label’s unique aural stew.

This diversity is deliberate, an attempt to move away from the rigid definitions and easy categorization pursued by labels and critics alike. “Every scene or underground is always a fiction to some extent,” explains Peter Gonda, co-founder of Baba Vanga with journalist Lucia Udvardyova. Continuing pressure to pin scenes to locations and ascribe unique properties to them can create a story that’s far from the truth. “The reality is never so simple,” says Gonda. “Any kind of attempt to round the artists, clubs, projects and their relations and connections into an easy-to-digest package that can be easily located and named should be taken with a grain of suspicion.” Hence Baba Vanga’s mantra: “The imprint specializes in anything that catches its fancy.”

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Although all of its releases are available as digital downloads, Baba Vanga deals primarily in cassettes. Its part of the ever-growing tape underground, a movement whose tendrils stretch across the globe, propelled by the enthusiasm of listeners for a medium once thought to be obsolete.

But while cassettes are “a suggestive, romantic and practical physical medium,” according to Udvardyova, the label’s reason for choosing tape is pragmatic and can be summed up in a single word: “Budget,” she says. Indeed, there’s little nostalgia for some fairytale past of physical mixtapes and bootleg trading: “I remember the CD and CD-r culture,” says Udvardyova.  Yet the label’s instincts are sound. Tapes are cheap and efficient to duplicate – factors that make it possible for underground labels and artists to run a sustainable operation while producing the physical products that their weirdo-music acolytes love to get their hands on.

Gloomy gurgles, mangled crunches

I first encountered Baba Vanga when a review copy of 2015’s ‘Impressions of Environment’, by the Hungarian arch doom-merchant Kokum, dropped through my postbox. Its overbearing, echo-laden soundscapes, full of mysterious throat-gurgles, ceremonial yowling and hefty rhythmic clanks are like field recordings from a dystopic alternative universe beamed through a black hole, a warning to all humans of some terrible, undisclosed fate.

Further investigation of the label’s back catalogue revealed that Udvardyova and Gonda practice exactly what they preach. The warped beat poetry of Benzokai’s ‘Identities Too Abstract’ – in which the Tallinn producer’s sibilant rants hiss over mangled electronic crunches – nudges up against the wayward breakcore overload of Hungarian bedroom genius Lanuk’s ‘vV’ and Maciej Maciagowski’s swirling, swooping ‘Goddnadog’ without incongruity or imbalance.

Baba Vanga’s latest release, from Serbian artist Marija Balubdzic, aka Umbra, maintains the high level of quality. ‘Unglued’ weaves ghostly vocals over layers of abrasive electronics. At times Balubdzic resolves these ingredients into a kind of quirky, jagged synth-pop, while, at others, her poetic monologues and growling sound design cast dark, nightmarish shapes.

At the centre of the album is ‘Bone Madamme’, its melancholy beauty like a Nick Cave murder ballad reflected in a cracked mirror. The folkish melody is half-Portishead, half Blixa Bargeld as it shifts from despairing whisper to full-throated lament, “Don’t let him drown me down,” she implores, a thudding drum machine marking her recitation like the tolling of a funeral bell.

Eastern Daze

The label’s nose for top-drawer output suggests a kind of curatorial second-sight that gives its name additional resonance. What better model for a label that prides itself in pinpointing the most brain-mangling artists from central Europe and beyond than a blind clairvoyant mystic from Bulgaria who claims to have predicted, among other things, the breakup of the Soviet Union and the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York?

A better explanation for Udvardyova and Gonda’s rock-solid instinct is their immersion in the cutting–edge sound and art from across the region since the early 2000s. Before Baba Vanga there was Eastern Daze, a vibrant web platform the duo created to highlight up-and-coming independent Eastern European arts and music scenes. And before Eastern Daze was a dissatisfaction with the lack of awareness about what was going on across the region.

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For Udvardyova, living in London at the start of the 21st century, the catalyst was a feeling of dislocation from the culture and history of her childhood. “We used to hang out after parties at my friends’ places, and I’d tell them about communism, and what I remembered from my childhood. It sounded like sci-fi, even to me,” she explains.

This sparked a renewed interest in what was happening back home. “Through distancing, I gained a new perspective and interest in the region I came from, and realised there’s no information about its music scenes anywhere. Everything was focused on the London-New York-Berlin axis.”

Grassroots investigations

While Udvardyova was in the UK, Gonda was in Bratislava, working at a student radio station called Tlis. “During my days it was pretty alternative regarding the musics and culture that was promoted; now I have the feeling it is more mainstream,” he says. The two met for the first time in 2009 at Prague’s Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, collaborating on a show about Czechoslovak experimental music for London’s Resonance FM soon after.

“We thought it was striking that there was no media outlet covering Eastern European music on a regional basis,” says Gonda. This thirst for discovery – plus a successful application to the Visegrand Fund, an organization supporting cooperation across the region – led to the pair heading off around Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Poland and the Czech Republic.

The investigation into local scenes and connection with fellow explorers and mavericks was fundamental to the formation of Eastern Daze and sowed the seeds for a network of contacts and relationships that sustains Baba Vanga to this day. Crucially, this also helps to keep the label free from the poor-but-sexy-Cold-War-brutalism-Twitterfeed-ostalgie of many less discerning operators. “What’s important is that this interest is not an orientalist gaze of the West,” notes Udvardyova, succinctly.

Lysergic ruckus

With such deep roots, Baba Vanga’s output was always going to be compelling. The label’s debut, a stunning grab-bag of lysergic ruckus from home-grown producer Střed Světa, was an irresistible statement of intent, released after one of his friends sent Udvardyova and Gonda some examples of his work. “I remember listening to it on the train from Slovakia to the Czech Republic five years ago. Somehow you just know that this is something special,” Udvardyova explains. Gonda agrees. “His sound is unique and we think he deserves a much wider recognition. His music is, somehow, the defining moment for Baba Vanga too.”

Listening back to Střed Světa’s self-titled debut, it’s easy to sympathise. The tape’s 15 tracks lurch out of the speakers in a scrappy, addictive mess. Grotty synths writhe over belching rhythm tracks, their constituent elements tottering as precariously as a pile of dirty crockery in a truckstop kitchen. Beats are cluttered, their grainy stumbles better suited to crashing out under a table than heading off to the dancefloor. Tracks like ‘Protéka Půdni Tmou’ squeak and chirrup with the hectic abandon of a drinkup in a parrot colony, while ‘Pohromou Přeskupené’ has the martial hop of some long-lost cut ‘n’ splice crate digger classic.

It’s a curious, sometimes baffling aesthetic, in which serendipity coexists with design. “A lot of details on my albums happened just by accident. I don’t know what mastering is. I don’t hear lot of the sounds in my tracks because I had volume set too quietly while I was making them,” Střed Světa explains over email. And as for fancy equipment? Forget it. “Mostly I use just a sampler, midi controller, the dictaphone on my mobile, maybe a few other things like an old Casio. A lot of percussion is recorded by knocking on a table with piece of wood, and lot of synth-sounds are just FM-noise from the radio,” he says. “All I need for music is just anything for looping and layering short audio-files. I don’t care about buying audio hardware.”

A remix album followed soon after that debut, with artists such as the UK’s Basic House and label mates Somnoroase Păsărele dicing Střed Světa’s tunes into some seriously bonkers shapes. A split tape with New Zealand’s Tlaotlon proved that a shared sensibility can triumph over physical distance, these two producers uniting in a commitment to uncompromising byte-mangled overload.

It took until March 2017, however, for a full-length follow-up to appear. With terse titles (‘A1’, ‘A2’, etc) and tracks moving along more tightly-defined rhythmic grids, ‘Rozmístění opakováním’ is a more focused affair. (“I tried to make something normal,” he explains.) Kick-drums, when they appear, are uptight and jerky – but more often they’re replaced by clanking, pots-and-pans percussion that suggests a late-night kitchen disco. Synths are as scrambled as ever, and beatless interludes see thick electronic washes slurping like oceans of Technicolor caramel.

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Crepuscular dronescape

Another early highlight of the Baba Vanga discography is Laura Luna’s ‘Isolarios’, a mesmerizing dronescape whose crepuscular half-light occupies a transitional zone between waking and sleeping. Thick organ chords shimmer within the gloom, their sluggish progress mirroring a body’s sluggish nocturnal processes. Subdued drum patters and irregular metallic clunks signal like forlorn echoes from the everyday world. Luna – full name Laura Luna Castillo – says the album was “inspired by science fiction stories about lost cosmonauts and expeditions without return.”

Pieces like ‘Nor Slumber Nor Sleep’, with its mix of field recordings, mournful electronics and extended ringing tones are imbued with a weary melancholia, the adventurer’s adrenalin-fuelled optimism yellowing into numbed despair, the food and water long gone and the final oxygen cylinder gradually running out. The comfortable numbness of ‘Oxytocin’ is appropriately hallucinogenic, its slow cascade of chirruping electronics and tectonic low-end rumbles tailor-made for implanting false memories into unwary human brains, the aural equivalent of Tarkovsky’s sentient planet in ‘Solaris’, its inscrutable rumble capable of all manner of psychological and emotional manipulation.

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Baba Vanga does a great job digging out non-conformists and outliers that don’t fit into local scenes – indeed, who exist without any local ‘alternative’ or ‘experimental’ music infrastructure. Says Udvardyova of the artists they release: “They stand out and do their own thing irrespective of any trends or hype.” Artists like Střed Světa owe as much to a virtualised sprawl of global interconnections as they do to any physical infrastructure on their doorstep. Hooked up to YouTube and BitTorrent, they drift in vast swirls of cultural debris, the detritus spewed out from centuries of global production, haunting these tidal deltas in search of vital fragments to reconstitute in modified forms. Marginalised by the totalizing glare of western culture, the work of these artists enacts a complex and contradictory dance of desire and repulsion, kicking against trends and practices shaped in the dancefloors and recording studios of the west, but also distancing themselves from the complex histories of their own countries.

Worn-out bangers

This perhaps explains why the Baba Vanga’s discography is relatively light on artists from territories with well-established underground scenes, such as Russia or Poland. There are exceptions, of course – one recent release, a thrilling assemblage of field recordings, found sound and noise rock, comes from the veteran St Petersburg band Won James Won. Titled ‘Prozrachnik’ (“a transparent psycho-magnetic deity, which was haunting schizophrenic dissidents all over the world during the Cold-War era”, apparently), this tape is not so much an album as a gateway to an alternative universe in which garbled horror-flick dialogue echoes down empty corridors and scattershot synths blink like searchlights across a rubble-strewn landscape.

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Even better is Új Bála’s ‘Boka’, a collection of worn-out electronica and fucked-up techno that’s reminiscent of mechanized city in meltdown. Új Bála is the synonym of Gábor Kovács, a musican and artist hailing from Budapest – another city with a burgeoning underground scene of its own. “The city’s underground is very busy nowadays,” agrees Kovács, highlighting the UH Fest, organized by the grassroots not-for-profit Ultrasound Foundation as an example, in contrast to the more mainstream house/techno labels (Farbwechsel, Dalmata Daniel) that the western press tend to focus on. “The free-jazz scene is also in the spotlight just as the hardcore/punk scene. So, there’s a lot going on,” he says.

But Kovács is wary of plugging himself into any defined group. “Previously I played in punk bands that weren’t punk enough for the punks, now I’m playing techno that isn’t techno enough for the technoheads.” With ‘Boka’, oozing into my headphones, I get it. While cuts like ‘I Break Horses’ lay down juddering electronics and kickdrum-handclap syncopations in stern, groovy lines, the layers of intestinal squelch and distorted squeal that Kovács pours over them are enough to discombobulate even the most jaded basement raver. And even if the pops and locks of the epic ‘Que Mala Suerte’ are bouncy enough to induce a sunrise endorphin rush, its melting, atonal synth loops soon transform joy into a slo-mo freakout.

Unstoppable drums

‘Boka’ has been a constant on my tape deck since it came out in March 2016. I found myself obsessing about the details of Kovác’s textures and the elegance in which the oily slicks of his synth lines interlock so perfectly with the off-centre crunches of percussion. Gear talk is usually anathema to my own gonzoid sensibility, but in this case I can’t help myself. “My set up was: Roland MC-303, Yamaha RX-5 for drums and a DSI Mopho Desktop analogue synth,” he explains. “My soundcard is a piece of shit. It has its own built-in tape hiss, so it’s a huge part of the sound – it’s relentlessly there when I’m recording. But I guess the main element is how I treat my Mopho. That synth is a lovely little troublemaker.” And those distinctive percussion patterns? “Techno is probably my main influence so I was always into drum programming. Drums make me unstoppable!”

Baba Vanga’s focus on under-reported artists from central and Eastern Europe is laudable and important. But, for all that, Udvardyova and Gonda’s criteria aren’t draconian. So far, their tendrils have extended to Tokyo, courtesy of Nobuyuki Sakuma’s CVN project (“a very special and unique piece of music”, says Udvardyova) and London, with Calum Gunn’s ‘Clipe’. Both releases have a pristine toughness, their dense and fractured soundscapes coalescing into diamond-sharp clarity. Both artists twist sound into impossible shapes, Sakuma’s collisions of videogame noise, digi-speech gasps and bipvert cutup transformed into, as the release notes put it, ‘a disjointed sonic portrait of the ordered chaos of the Japanese capital.’

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In contrast, ‘Clipe’ is almost heart-stoppingly utopian. Nagging bass drum patter and titanium synth lines mark out cortex-expanding grids. Glittery pulsations hiss and weave. Mechanoid handclaps hustle and dab, while code-wrenched chords drip into pastel-coloured puddles. “I had a huge crush on glossy, high-definition synthesis and rigid patterns,” says Gunn of his compositions, which he created using the free, open-source SuperCollider platform in combination with Errorsmith’s Razor software.

Gunn, rather modestly, describes the tunes as “based around the algorithmic creation of patterns with a few user-controlled parameters … recorded live with some minimal editing.” I prefer to see them as dispatches from a leisure complex of the far future, a non-stop erotic cabaret Bluetoothed direct to your pleasure centres, with everything you could ever want or need downloaded instantaneously from the ever-present Cloud.

Open and different

Gunn is enthusiastic about working with Baba Vanga, citing the label’s openness to the work he produced. Gábor Kovács is similarly positive. He tells me via email how he first met Udvardyova and Gonda at a club night they’d organized in Bratislava. “I really liked the whole event and their attitude, as all the artists hung out together like a weird school class. I decided that if I ever come up with something interesting I would contact them.”

That said, things aren’t exactly easy for the label or its artists. “It’s really hard to live from your music alone,” says Gonda. “The whole infrastructure is very fragile,” adds Udvardyova. Both her and Kovács tell me that three important venues for underground music in Budapest are threatened with closure.

Yet Baba Vanga’s collegiate atmosphere and its co-founders’ network of ground-level connections established by Easter Daze give the label solid foundations for the future, not to mention the confidence to avoid chasing empty trends. Peter Gonda admits that “to define a scene or not-yet heard local micro-genre,” may have “an attractive and an alluring aspect to it” for labels and critics. “But it could easily lead to click-bait and sensationalism,” he concludes. Far better, as Udvardyova says to “release artists who are somehow different.”

https://babavanga.bandcamp.com/

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Baba Vanga: five ways in

Umbra: Unglued

Umbra is Serbian artist Marija Balubdzic. “It is based on female voice and its processing, sometimes venturing into the territory of darkly romantic singer-songwriter stuff, but always having an interesting electronic, noisy edge,” says Udvardyova.

https://babavanga.bandcamp.com/album/umbra-unglued

Somnoroase Păsărele: CO

Romanian duo Gili Mocanu and Elena Album’s second tape for Baba Vanga is an metallic labyrinth of churning electronics and brutal noise. “We met Gili in person for the first time in Prague, at the release party of their tape ABECD … he drove for 16 hours in a car all the way from Romania,” explains Peter Gonda.

https://babavanga.bandcamp.com/album/somnoroase-p-s-rele-co

Superskin: Descent

Drowsy, dubby repetitive beats from this Austrian producer, whose sophomore release for the label, ‘Protrusions’, came out in late 2017. In ‘Descent’, ghostly elevator music meanders over supple, skeletal percussion. Tracks move from the lounge to the echo chamber and into deep space.

https://babavanga.bandcamp.com/album/superskin-descent

Tlaotlon / Střed Světa: Split

The label deepened their ongoing relationship with Prague’s Střed Světa on this split with the Australian-born, New Zealand resident Jeremy Coughbrough, aka Tlaotlon. Světa’s bumpy squelches merge perfectly with Coughbrough’s data-scuzz in this long-distance meeting of minds.

https://babavanga.bandcamp.com/album/tlaotlon-st-ed-sv-ta-split

Quarantaine: Lichtempfindlich!

A rare move into the archive for the label, with the reissue of this 1984 album of battered and brooding machine music from Czech duo Slavek Kwi and Jaroslav Palat. Says Udvardyova: “Despite its bona fide crudeness, Quarantaine’s music remains timeless”.

https://babavanga.bandcamp.com/album/quarantaine-lichtempfindlich

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https://babavanga.bandcamp.com 

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