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Lacerba is/are a dramatically obscure ambient project from the small town of Kuznetsk in the Penza region of Russia, some considerable distance south of Moscow. As we can see from the image below, there are very few signs of urban life once the milometer starts clicking regularly, hour after hour.  This sense of visible distance lies at the foundation of Lacerba’s noises, too: a richly, if not disconcertingly atmospheric soundscape that - with echoing vocal samples and whale calls - is keen to evoke a sense of bottomless expanses aurally.

Lacerba are hard to find, and they compose music dedicated to obscure places - that are also hard to define. The fundamental obscurity of which we speak emerges from an absence of concrete online sources: there’s no stable center for downloading their work, and even the newest release, “Hum Tool” (presented here) is seemingly connected with a Live Journal blog created by the the band just for this EP. Once public interest has passed, it’ll no doubt vanish into the digital equivalent of those whale-filled oceans, occasionally evoked in some of the band’s artwork.

Their use of the host/venue Last.FM includes no biography, just a default message from the website that “There’s currently no biography for this artist. Would you like to help write one?” Registered listeners on the site are invited to contextualize these Lacerba recordings, especially if our Kuznetsk artists won’t help out.

And this, to some degree, is what makes “Hum Tool” interesting… thus far. We have some very dark, ambient compositions that have not been given any concrete linguistic definition by their makers. It seems fair to say, however, that these tracks would be assessed by most members of an audience as “troubling.” Small children would gain little pleasure from their ominous overtones.

Given, in other words, no concrete indications of what exactly makes “Hum Tool” an “upsetting” series of sounds, how does its initial audience react? When proffered some worrying music today, which anxieties in particular are at the forefront of Russians’ shared imagination?

The first reactions to these 47 minutes of nervousness take the following form: “I’d say the album as a whole is interesting. I’d call it classic ambient work. I’ll admit that I’m not a real fan of this style, but I’d really like to say a thing or two about ‘Hum Tool,’ since I’ve already listened to the entire thing a few times - in order to understand exactly what it is. In terms of emotions, it reminds me of the Stalker computer game: that included the kind of ambient soundtrack that really carried you off into the future.  At 4:47 seconds there was something in Arabic, I think. It really woke me up!”

“Wow… it’s hard to make any kind of comment, since I don’t really know much about this style. In other words, I can’t talk about any mistakes in the music - and I wouldn’t suggest there are any! The only thing to say is that it’s a good piece of work.” Or, elsewhere: ”In essence these are all very atmospheric compositions, without any real sense of rhythm; the melodies, likewise, aren’t expressed in any clear fashion.  They’re diluted into the music as a whole.” Again, the central issues of metamorphosis and osmosis find expression in the band’s artwork.

These are the sounds of worrying change.

In short, at least from these initial sketches, we see a series of underlying anxieties, framed by references to Andrei Tarkovsky’s film “Stalker,” or at least the computer game based upon it. The film is a nationally famous narrative about a guide (or “stalker”) who leads to men into a zone where - allegedly - they will have the chance to confront their innermost and most brutally honest thoughts. The Stalker insists there are grave dangers in this zone, but his accompanying travellers doubt him, since no drama of consequence emerges for a long time.

The computer game made the zone more specific, using the aftermath of Chernobyl… and all manner of sci-fi mutants in its wake (above). The world here had indeed metamorphosed in unknown, unspeakable ways and this evolutionary process soon adopted monstrous forms, with whom our digital Stalker does battle.

Once we take the film’s structure (of a Dantesque guide) and turn it into a computer game, then all sense of help or guidance is gone. In the worst possible sense, the world is now immersive and interactive: I am responsible for my own decisions, and would love dearly to have quiet confidence in my surroundings… but cannot.

What shakes me out of a brief, blissful sense of slumber? The Arabic language.

The more positive online comments on “Hum Tool” thus far, sidestepping any such nervous sleeplessness, come from those listeners who can define the soundscapes in vaguer terms. This tendency, likewise, can be clarified or rephrased: Lacerba’s dark ambient compositions recall the desiring/desirous structure of Tarkovsky’s epic (of ineffable drives). We never quiet know what to expect or how far we should go.  If I don’t discern those hopes and fears terribly clearly, they cause me no concern. One way in which to maintain this peace and quiet is to listen to Lacerba’s work once - and never return to the compositions; works encountered once only - and then followed by others - become an overall sense of passage or motion. There’s no disconcerting, permanently bounded “zone” in which we find ourselves. We’re constantly on the move elsewhere, thus making hope (and delusion!) possible.

If, however, we listen to these seemingly formless works several times (as our first commentator above), their limits, borders, and fixed structures emerge. And what’s the worst context we can possibly imagine? A post-nuclear landscape increasingly populated by (unexpected) Muslim presences. These are the “monstrous” figures to parallel the enemies of our computer game.

Recent figures suggest that Russia’s population includes more than 50 million self-confessed Muslims: working in office buildings, market places, and other poorly-paid venues, they appear to have inherited the symbolic role of a nuclear threat - or post-nuclear nightmare.

No wonder Lacerba’s recording is so full of whale calls; in a nation of increasingly fluid borders and/or spiritual flux, a deep-set, long-repressed sense of communicative or social disconnect is finding expression in the anchorless noises of an ambient void. Music bereft of rhythmic markers becomes a sounding-board for an audience’s parallel paranoia; without rhythmic units we have no sense of time’s passage.  We don’t know where we are… and that, apparently, leads to the two worst possible things we can imagine: post-nuclear mutants or Tadzhik market traders.

They’re both out there somewhere in the white noise.