MARIANA SEMKINA
Edited by Jo Kendall jo.kendall@futurenet.com
Mariana Semkina’s debut solo album begins with her singing ‘One day I’ll find the hole inside what used to be my dark heart’ and ends with ‘I am laced in sadness’. As you might imagine, what occurs in-between isn’t exactly a frolicking funk-fest of upbeat party bangers. As with her mothership, St Petersburg duo Iamthemorning, melancholy sighs and swoops dominate the mood, creating a landscape that’s broody, introspective, melodramatic and deeply intense. Yet as Semkina herself has said, raising a toast to human misery is entirely normal in Russia, and when her influences aren’t patriotically stern, they’re jolly japers like Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf. “Dead girls” have been a recurring theme; others have ranged from fairy tales to mental illness to horror stories.
All of which might make this sound a depressing prospect, but like all the best sad-hearted music it ultimately lifts you up. Having given you a good wallow, a vessel in which to vent, it pats you on the back and sets you off refreshed on your road. Sleepwalking turns the screw as it progresses, but that mood gets cranked up (or should we say down) until it reaches a point of catharsis.
It feels as if Iamthemorning arrived fully formed with 2016’s Lighthouse, which won acclaim and awards here. In fact they’ve been crafting their shadowy chamber-prog constructions for a decade, with four studio albums, culminating in last year’s The Bell, another album about “human cruelty and pain”. Her pianist partner Gleb Kolyadin released an uncompromisingly stern, gothic solo album in 2018, mildly leavened by guest appearances from Steve Hogarth and Jordan Rudess, and now it appears it’s the singer’s turn. She too calls in a host of impressive players: Dream Theater’s keyboardist Rudess, bassist Nick Beggs, drummer Craig Blundell and, for good measure, the St Petersburg Orchestra. She’s called it a therapeutic album “to help me get through some hard times”, gathering songs “too personal” to record under any name but her own. “Mortality” is another key motor to her muse.
Sleepwalking KSCOPE
Like all the best sad-hearted music, Sleepwalking ultimately lifts you up.
The world in which this music exists – poetic, nocturnal, and for want of a less-abused word, arty – has been explored in the past by one or two Kate Bush albums, but the frequent comparisons made between Semkina and that icon seem somehow ill-fitting. Bush also allows her positivity, her joie de vivre, to flower in her work. Semkina is more focused on facing the tides of midnight. The piano-led backing places her closer to Tori Amos, though this record, thanks to its musicians, offers more skip and swing and undulating undercurrents. There’s undoubtedly a folk-formed presence too, with spells recalling Renaissance or the more reflective, pensive moments of All About Eve. One is also minded to cite the 4AD acts of the early 80s who were satirised by nonbelievers as women in floaty white dresses cooing ethereally. Yet one mentions all these references only to make sure you have the right boots – and mindset – on before wading in. For all Sleepwalking’s lightness of touch in terms of musicianship and arrangements, it is, to put it bluntly, profoundly heavy stuff.
Like a film (Tarkovsky, anyone?), it’s best experienced as a whole, its individual tracks part of an immersive process bent on pathos and poignancy. It’s rich with engrossing passages: the way the keening strings flow from Everything Burns into Mermaid Song as almost subliminal rhythms skitter and scatter; the vocal call and response section on the gripping Lost At Sea; the piano rivulets from Rudess on closing ballad Still Life which feel as transporting as Mike Garson’s Aladdin Sane contributions. And there’s a sense of resolution by the end, a calm after the tempest. We’ve been tossed around by the album’s ocean like tiny humans in a Turner painting. Spiritually, Semkina’s creations are, on the surface, very Pre-Raphaelite, but the longer you spend with them the closer they veer to the eerie surrealism of Dora Maar or Dorothea Tanning.
The ruminations of the emotionally troubled complement and clash throughout. On the raw Am I Sleeping Or Am I Dead, she sings ‘All I find are beautiful dead things around’, while on the arresting Ars Longa Vita Brevis she describes her own “death” as ‘magnificent – you can’t put it any other way’. Obviously, she is inhabiting characters and personae, telling stories, imagining herself into other women. In that sense, she’s simply fulfilling the role of the fearless artist. As she sings on Skin, ‘Pandora’s box is open, nightmares are set free’. However, as is often the case with the Gothic, whether born of Poe or Lovecraft or Mary Shelley, the beasts thus released turn out to have a radiant, shocking beauty to which something inside us relates and responds. Sleepwalking leads us down some ghostly corridors to a new way of looking at the light.
