Detailierte Künstler Informationen: Psvsv

PSVSV
location: Moscow
formed: 2003
status: active
styles: electropop, experimental, electonic

PSVSV is an experimental electro-musical ensemble formed in Tomsk in 2003 by futurist carrying the name of psvsv (also known as ex-percussionist of post-industrial band Sekta Phoenixa; later the ensemble joined by some other members of then recently disbanded Sekta).

“PSVSV” is an abbreviation of a bit distorted Russian translation of a line from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, “non bene junctarum discordia semina rerum” [Met. I, 9] – Плохо связанные враждой семена вещей [Plokho svyazannyje vrazhdoj semena veschej]. This full name of the ensemble, with a slight twist of the meaning in it, can be translated into English as “badly combined with discordance atoms of things”.

This poetical description of the primordial Chaos can refer either to the peculiarities of the ensemble’s method, or to the subject of its work. Experimenting widely with the musical language, PSVSV consider their enterprise a scientific research, regarding music as a means of exploration of the impersonal archetypical structures.

For PSVSV to explore is to exercise and to express, though the subject of their music, to their point of view, can not be treated as “individual”, “psychic” etc. However, the structures they deal with may be called “informational”. Futuristic informationalism, having been confessed initially by the ensemble, according to which “information” has been supposed to become a replacement of other states of matter (or of the matter itself), is nowadays manifestly conjunct in their work with an attempt of investigation (or expression) of the impersonal “sacral”.

Antipsychologism and counter-anthropomorphism of PSVSV reveal itself in their researching on the mathematics of the unconscious, and asserting that “the only true surrealist is the machine”. They use to take the part of the machine, and even share its point of view, traditionally including PC in their line-up as a band member.

Anyway, the project is remarkable for the employment of the computer as a fully-functional musical instrument, designing sound constructions in real time. There’s a certain deal of improvisation in the band’s work, though PSVSV generally succeed to keep balance between spontaneity and pre-calculation.

The music of the ensemble is stylistically extremely diverse: it can be direct and simple, gravitating to synth pop or electro as the forms of “new sincerity”, – this can be dance music, even groovy, though its rhythm may vary, often engaging odd meters (“for those dancers whose number of legs is odd or fractional”); or their music can be rather complicated, subliming and subverting pop, combining heterogeneous elements and effacing borderlines between genres, – this aspect of their work reminds of sophisticated self-destroying machines, and can be characterized as “post-rock-in-opposition”.

PSVSV play beautiful, gripping, even dramatic, though completely non-anthropomorphic music, and there’s a certain black humor within: what you hear is the lyricism of a machine, or the laughter of a love song generating apparatus. The subject-matter of this music fluctuates between luxury and charming post-humanity, fancy-goods futurism – from one hand, and from the other – depicting cardinal shifts and dying, sound psycho-analysis – if to understand this term literally, as “soul decomposition”, or revealing the marks of the “soul’s” absence. Metamorphoses, alterations, transitions are also the leading themes, which express sliding beyond “self” in the mystery of informational annihilation of reality.

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