The Oaken Chariot Biznes Time

What is the sound of Russian dub? There is a storied history of attempts to adapt roots music to the Russian soil, but most of them can be attributed to reggae (the so-called 'northern' variety) rather than dub. Gost has history with the town of Smolensk. It's home to Gamayun, whose great album Filterealism was released on our label last year. Now Anton, one of Gamayun's members, presents his new duo Dubovaya Kolesnitsa (The Oaken Chariot). In his words, it has no connection to his other band at all, and is an attempt to go back to the roots of a genre that doesn't exist.

This isn't a serious theoretical proposition, but rather one with a sense of irony and joy: you can even feel it in the name of the collective. The Russian word for oak, 'dub', looks exactly like the genre, and the chariot emerged from the name for the group's jams - 'telega' - which can be translated as cart. All the music here is the result of live improvisations: no samples, just instruments (notably Vasiliy Shilov's bass). These recordings have been slightly edited, and even the almost indecipherable texts are freestyles. There's no place for real riddims in Russian dub: sometimes this record sounds like something akin to dub variations on underground Russian hip hop (and we mean that in the best possible way).

The music of Dubovaya Kolesnitsa is genuinely fun, free and mesmerising, but we could also approach it more conceptually. Theoretician Michael E. Veal describes dub as a 'postsong', taking the form of "linguistic, formal and symbolic indeterminacy". The duo's faintly eerie compositions call back to the notion of musical hauntology. There is an attempt, without any direct references, to reconstruct the feeling of something that was never there at all. A little nostalgic and very forwardthinking at the same time, the music of Dubovaya Kolesnitsa is best described in their own words. In the opening track, a voice can be heard saying "eto delo v lob", which means something like "it's a straight on thing". This is very direct, almost in the vein of folk music. This a great - and, it must be said, successful - experiment in searching for the soul of Russian dub. Simple as that.