Knyaz Mishkin Releases "Usialiakaje"

A lengthier tradition of this folkish psychedelia, however, comes from outfits like Knyaz Mishkin, named after the hero of Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot and based in Minsk. That ensemble, fronted by Leonid Narushevich has, in fact, been in existence for two decades. Over that lengthy period, and thanks nowadays to the distribution possibilities of the web, the band has also managed to publish over thirty albums. Electrate proposed a form of self-expression that was devoid of punctuation and thus “freer": Knyaz Mishkin turned that stream-like utterance into a production technique.

Endless sentences become endless sound.

And on a stylistic or generic level, the group is committed to what it calls “intuitive improvisation" on stage, which has allowed for the inclusion of Knyaz Mishkin in a wide range of line-ups, all the way from blues and folk to avant-garde jazz festivals. Narushevich attributes the origins of his own improvisational enterprise to schoolboy efforts in the mid-70s. That initial desire to move beyond habit was born of a special fantasy, he says, the kind that grew from a lack of international and/or cultural contact. Put differently, Narushevich has often asserted that the USSR's isolation spawned a certain kind of naive imagination: “We're all children of the Soviet Union. We're idiots." In the best possible sense.

Usialiakaje from Knyaz Mishkin is available at h-a-z-e.org.