Sounds While Standing With Ukraine

Entering the renegade sound world of Valentina Goncharova

Confession: The cover got me to this one.

While browsing Bandcamp’s surprisingly rich offerings from Ukraine the other day, I was intrigued by the image of a woman with a cello, wearing a regal outfit that wouldn’t raise eyebrows if she was performing with the Sun Ra Arkestra.

That’s Valentina Goncharova, who abandoned the conservatory path (she studied at the famed Leningrad conservatory) to pursue electronic and experimental music in the 1980s. A multi-instrumentalist, Goncharova explored drones, musique concrete and unusual electronic modifications of acoustic instruments: On her multitracked reel-to-reel home recordings, she’d sometimes sing or shout into the fingerboard of an amplified cello instead of capturing voice through a microphone.

The first volume of her experimental works, released in 2020, is all solo. The Volume 2 followup is devoted to duets and collaborations recorded between 1987 and 1991. There’s much improvisation — and, perhaps no surprise, some wandering noodling — in three spontaneous musical conversations between Goncharova and saxophonist Sergei Letov. A tune called “Rock Jazz” offers textural washes of sound organized around recurring arpeggio-like structures created by Goncharova and Finnish composer Pekka Airaksinen. Other pieces dwell in more somber zones, pursuing spirituality through synthesis.

These ear-stretching documents were released by Shukai, a Ukrainian label devoted to archival excavations of Soviet and Ukrainian electronic music from the 1960s-’80s. The label’s Bandcamp catalog is accessible via the link above. Supporting the label’s work is another way of Standing with Ukraine.

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Also in vault-discovery news: This week, International Anthem announced the future release of home-studio tapes made by the Chicago producer and multi-instrumentalist Charles Stepney in the late 1960s. Stepney’s name is attached to bunches of great records, including works by Earth Wind & Fire, the Dells, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Ramsey Lewis. Stepney is credited for developing, over six records, the lush studio-strings sound of the inventive Rotary Connection (the band that launched Minnie Riperton). He also produced and arranged Riperton’s solo debut, Come to My Garden. The idyllic “Step on Step,” the lead track from the forthcoming vault project, offers a clear view into Stepney’s thinking about harmony and keyboard voicings:

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