Cukor Bila Smert' - Recordings 1990-1993

Mammoth collection of recordings documenting the early 90s output of Cukor Bila Smert (trans: Sugar - White Death), the trio Svitlana Nianio formed with Oleksandr Kohanovs’kyi and Tamila Mazur in Kyiv in the late 80s, and whom were later joined by influential guitarist Eugene Taran. It's not entirely clear from the biography provided, but it appears as if Recordings 1990-1993 mostly covers Nianio and Taran's work together, and shows the pair to be closely tuned to the grand tradition of European art music, sharing a similar spirit if not exact sonic approach to that of the giants of Faust, Nico, Amon Duul, Henry Cow et al. Prog doesn't quite cut it as a description, though the sound they make is certainly a progressive and exploratory one, moving between folk, jazz, artrock experimentalism, the ghostly ethereality of post-punk era 4AD and occasionally no-wave abrasion in ways that feel unrooted from a specific era. If Taran was first a guitarist, then I have to assume that the best work here comes from Nianio in the beautifully composed crystalline synth and string arrangements that define the record's second half - see the incredible three-song run of 'Poliuwannia', 'Smilywo Chodit’ Do Zymy' and 'Zradnyky'. Aside from who did what, what does seem most important is that if the title didn't tell us so, I'd struggle to tell you when exactly this appeared in the accelerated interior history of late 20th century pop culture. Perhaps that's due to the groups origins and mother tongue, where western idioms are reinterpreted in an eastern European context so as to render the familiar new again. I suppose it's not entirely dissimilar to what Japanese artists have been doing for years with western rock music, where a song is at once simultaneously recognisable and alien, the resultant sounds essentially endemic of an entirely different set of experiences. In the grand scheme of things, Cukor Bila Smert aren't exactly without context or precedent, it's just that their vision was realised through a different lens to many of their contemporaries. As such, it makes listening back now feel like the sharing of lost secrets, charged with not quite graspable mystery.