Igor Krutogolov has been getting good at unpredictability, and White takes his mysterious mischievousness up to the next level. No matter what you have previously heard of him (his work with jazz-punksters Kruzenshtern I Parohod, his Karate Band, his noise music, his previous music for film or dance), White is not what you expected. The packaging contains very little information, with an almost-white tree and donkey on white background, an entirely blank, eight-page booklet, and a partial list of instruments performed by Krutogolov: bowed bass, strings, voice, keyboards, objects, flute and birds. Ido Azaria is credited for bells and Yariv Talmor for the rain recordings heard throughout the uninterrupted 77 minutes of sound. The music itself is a very delicate, repetitive and lament-like tone poem. A melancholic sketch of a melody is slowly traded back and forth from instrument to instrument and punctuated with recorder calls, Sigur Rós-like vocal flights, and other miscellaneous sounds. Slightly pastoral at first, the music slowly grows mournful, hitting heart-clenching sadness around the 36th minute. And throughout it all is the sound of rain on rooftops, a sound that will remain long after the music is all gone (the last 30 minutes of the album consist of only that field recording, with faint singing heard in the background). There is a bit of Mahler in the use of string instruments and a bit of Godspeed You Black Emperor! in the build-up in track six (the piece is indexed as seven untitled tracks), but generally White sticks to its own soundworld, a rather narrow world, where ideas are often reiterated and things do get a bit long-winded. It makes very nice background music though, or something to gently fall asleep to.
© François Couture /TiVo