the music of dakha brakha
"...Oh Fate, my fate..."
For the second time, in the last few years, we’ve had the great pleasure of this amazing band, from a free Kyiv to join us - Dakha Brakha…
and delicious Derek Mazzone’s voice trails off into a forest
whose music is squirrel cheep and birdsong.
That is the beginning of a four-and-a-half-year old recording of a performance for KEXP, by the Ukranian band Dakha-Brakha (‘give/take’ in the old Ukranian language) The first time I heard it a few months ago, I was cycling through Lodhi Road, and the darkness of slow traffic. The trees on both sides of the avenue embraced overhead. Ol’ Safdarjung’s tomb blinked out the night, with red-bordered lamps. As the first song began, I felt my pulse racing, eyes become alert, and the anvil of my backbone reverberated with percussive heart drumming up a hummingbird’s song. The song was slung like a floral shirt in a drab morning on the taut clothesline of an unrelenting Cello, and the creeping metronome of a big Drum, hoarse harbinger caressed into cursed flame.
The song Vesna is more than music. It is the accumulation of moments that slowly congeal into awareness, the nostalgic silence of a filmstar walking into an empty theatre, where once her films played. The cello, an instrument, I have most loved through Nancy Kulkarni’s renditions of alaap (if you haven’t, I recommend the alaap in Mani Kaul’s, Before My Eyes, as a different setting for Raag Shree on the Cello), comes alive in the hands of the singer and cellist Nina Garenetska. Her warm pluck is precursor to voice, and other human produced sounds that carry a tremor of unabashed freedom. The performers, who saw themselves as ambassadors (let’s set aside for the moment the problem of essentialising) of their culture, found a way of planting intuition in the resoluteness of bricolage, the way uniforms can be sexy in a parade.
The camera is pure language in most of KEXP’s videos -a mode adopted by several music shows whose proposed project is always of nation building through ‘foregrounding of the periphery’. The Camera borders on the eager, moving slowly across stationary bodies, tracing the band-members in their traditional costumes, on the map of the nation. This is an old trope, with new equipment.
“This is our way of struggle. We show people of Ukraine. We show our history, our culture to the people of the world.”
I find the band’s storytelling fascinating. I am drawn into the careful selection of elements that populate the imagination of a nation, sponged through questions of international relations and capital. The band musically understands and splays an endless war, and this in itself, is a kind of critique, a disruption. How the world consumes this, and how a transformation is birthed in the unravelling of a musical joke (say of beat, or melody, or meaning making, even), or the pause after a song, where Mazzone’s banter relaxes the tightness of the performance. This is a kind of artistic geography whose contours I find useful, and transcendent.
The sprinkle of colour, the stories of locals, and the laughter, both comic and dramatic. No music has felt so compelling, and if you watch the entire video, the cinematic rush of their movements is unavoidable. I had to actually stop my cycle, and turn back home, to see the entire video. And that is just what I did. My youtube autplay continues to share their music from time to time. And a couple of days ago this recording played again… “from a free" Kyiv”. The irony hit hard, and I was surprised, then to not find youtube comments such as “listening to this in Feb 2022, when the ol’man putin lost the plot”. Is it alright to feel, in that moment, the overconfidence of optimisim?
I will not go too deep into the meaning of the lyrics of the song, simply because each song (even in this video) would demand a separate enquiry. Broadly, their songs revolve around themes of folk music, but rewritten with the diversity and brute power of instruments such as double bass, cello, tabla drum etc. So there are songs about the dearth of good husbands- a 100 year old song (whose problem is still there, the manager explains), and about ‘calling for spring’ (after the long winter). ‘Pre-christianic and pagan’ themes are explored by the band.
The intent in this nationalism that I referred to earlier, I believe, is particular to the history of conflict that is part of their narrative of exploding presents. In that sense, it is a political project, as articulated by the bandmembers too. What struck me was that the activity of the consumption of this music is something that is unique to every viewer, yes, but, also similar in construction because of the pervasiveness of the screen. In a sense, I feel like I can speak with some certainty about the shared experience of discovery together, in an intimate way.
The energy of a restless, fearless spring breathes in performance, charged with the absorbing polyphones that they birth into unexpected melody, and harmony. That a person could be so consumed in song that even communication is secondary, I found irresistible.In such moments, the nod is quick, and more joyous.
How could I resist sharing this with you, then?
#standwithukraine #makemusicnotwar
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