Moscow’s AAGSF are an outfit that we have covered on a couple of occasions.  Our main interest has been the ways in which AAGSF associate their drone-like ambient textures with an escape from specificity.  Prior recordings had been tagged with textual snippets such as: “Matter cannot appear, nor can it disappear.  The AAGSF project has always been that way, too.  The sounds of new galaxies, of new civilizations.  AAGSF is the heritage of a global infinity.”

In a similar spirit, as we also noted before, AAGSF always replaced possible images of themselves with anonymous photographs of unrecognizable locations.  This new recording changes things a little.  First of all, the washes of ambient sound are now punctuated by two spoken sound bites.  The first comes from Tupac Shakur’s “Fame“:  “The one thing we all adore/ Something worth dying for/It’s been nothing but pain/Stuck in this game/ Searching for fortune and fame.”

The song, over and above its generalized observations about fame, fortune, and their disconcerting allure, carries a great deal of the tension that fueled the East/West Coast hip-hop rivalry.  From expressions of ethnic unity and shared hardships, hip-hop had (by 1996), retreated into a series of turf wars so intense that - judging by these lyrics - even the bodies of several rappers themselves became well-defended enclaves.  “Fame” gives powerful expression to these shrinking spaces.

Earlier talk of inclusiveness became precisely the opposite: walls went up, as did cynicism.  In the words of Shakur himself elsewhere:  “Who shot me? But ya punks didn’t finish, Now ya ‘bout to feel the wrath of a menace…”  This is hardly suitable rhetoric to accompany the trusting, “global infinity” of AAGSF’s earlier releases.

The band continues to name-check ambient heroes like Evan Bartholomew, of whom the American press have written: “Serenity pervades every single pore as the sounds wistfully seep in and out of your ears. Like a gentle prairie wind and the sound of the flying crows up ahead, the music is a tranquil oasis for the mind and soul.”

Nonetheless, we get the strong impression with “Wonderful Bloom/The Last Breath” that things are changing.  Even the EP’s split title is a dramatic juxtaposition: growth and decline, blossoming and suffocation.

Something serious has altered the tone of erstwhile ambience.  A musical or sonic style designed to capture ubiquitous states that simply are has now evoked a violent gangland conflict, cynicism, and the contraction of prior ubiquity to a small, threatened enclave.  This seems especially foregrounded when we remember that the Tupac track comes from the end of his life, just before he was murdered in a drive-by shooting.

The other spoken text on this EP is a monologue from Nikita Mikhalkov’s courtroom drama “12,” read by Mikhail Efremov.  It also rails against any idea of a unified, harmonious society.  The speaker, like Shakur, is both alienated and aggravated:  “Before you’ve even come into the court, your ugly mugs are ready to start cackling.  You find absolutely everything funny:  Life, death, tsunamis, earthquakes… and you’re still laughing… Ha, ha, ha!  The murder of a policeman… Ha, ha, ha!… Five million orphaned children… Ha, ha, ha!… And why d’you keep laughing, eh?   Why all this ‘Ha, ha, ha’?  Because when things get serious, you’re scared.”

Efremov’s character in the film then goes on to say that he went to a Moscow meeting in order to speak to the public about “my life and life in general.”  Although we’re not told whether anybody actually asked him to do so, nonetheless this man is severely troubled by the fact his observations were also treated as a joke, which left him - as our cynical rapper - in an advanced state of anxious, angry self-defense.

Since we’re dealing with this shift from open-armed, ambient soundscapes to standoffish cynicism, there’s also a dramatic change musically, or at leas rhythmically.  The barely punctuated fabric of AAGSF’s prior catalog is handed over to Ukrainian breakcore DJ Rombik.

This is an EP that marks the move from ambient universality to choices, to an ethical stance that is forced upon the voices we hear.  It’s the ugly choice between East and West coast; the need to define oneself against external threats.  The very spaces that ambient music celebrates have now become something ominous and - in Efremov’s words - “frightening.”

It makes sense, therefore, that music of moral commitment also demarcate itself rigidly.  Flows become segments; universal statements become the building blocks of beats and/or their absence.  To choose breakcore, however, is something radical indeed.  If this EP is pondering contemporary issues of grim decision-making that are forced upon its characters between social binaries (right/wrong, east/west, guilty/innocent), then breakcore surely gives audible shape to opposites that are coming and going with unpleasant speed.

Although “Wonderful Bloom/The Last Breath” has a traditionally tranquil cover, its contents - given the context of Tupac, Efremov’s Chechnian tragedy, and Rombik’s furious breakcore - draw a spatially specific, very worrying picture.

Even the photographs used by AAGSF have become more precise.  If they are supposed to contextualize the music, as they have done in the past, then the location of these brutal, “breakbeat” social declines is made very clear:  Moscow.

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