813

“The music that makes money here is just completely soulless,” says Alexander Goryachev, a 23-year-old Moscow firefighter who releases music as 813. “And only in Russia do people actually listen to it. In other countries, maybe in Europe, there’s music that is listened to around the world.” While less frenetic than DZA’s output, 813 still blends styles together atop the ubiquitous stutter that has come to define wonky. His recent release, Back in Space Jungle, marries Pointer Sisters-style synths to snares dripping with gated reverb, a strange homage to 80s movie soundtracks filtered through wobbly downbeats. “Ultramagnetic Pipirkus” could pass for some late 1970s keytar funk if it wasn’t for the lasergun sounds popping up on a regular basis. “Ulei”, from his SoundCloud page, freaks a smooth Rhodes sample into a delicate balance of shakere and tumbling bass kicks. And his track on Fly Russia, “Zondor Fo”, knocks those off-kilter drums against an overdriven synth bass and a smattering of filter sweeps. It’s music made of contradictions, always toying with the notion of cliché. Sitting in a café in GUM, a mall full of designer boutiques located on Red Square (in perhaps the city’s most glaring contradiction, Lenin’s tomb on one side of Red Square looks directly at a Louis Vuitton store on the other), 813 laments a recent Wall Street Journal article about Noize MC, a Moscow rapper who has recorded music critical of the Kremlin. “It’s awful that this is being referred to as a ‘revolution,’” he sighs. “What he does is just pop music. Just because he’s on TV, people think it’s some sort of revolution.” 813 grew up in Moscow taping late-night hip-hop shows off the radio and rapping with his friends, but started focusing solely on instrumentals in 2003. For half a decade he worked on self-described trip-hop, “but then I realized that that music was just too depressing.” When the first sounds of wonky reached Moscow, he remembers, it caught his ear, even though it took a little while for people here to understand. When it finally did, it started changing as it filtered through the infamous “Russian soul,” he says jokingly. “Everyone latches on to a particular style and then mutates it in their own way,” he shrugs. “In Germany, I think it’s a little harder, maybe with more synthesizers. But we have our own melodies, our own mutations, something that is uniquely Russian.”