Dolphin on the Edge: The Last Album as a Monument to the Protest Movement

Dolphin is one of the founders of the Russian indie scene. He was and still is one of the few experimenters who prefer to try out new sounds, original presentation of material, unexpected ideas - instead of blind imitation, which Russian rockers used to do in their time, and now rappers "Freshmen" sinfully do. Even hip-hop, which Dolphin confidently refuses to claim the title of ancestor, was once chosen by his "Malchishnik" as an innovative form of self-expression, as a protest not only against the primitive and monstrous pop culture of the 1990s, but also against the pathos rock movement, which claimed to be an apostolic mission in the new Russia.

When hip-hop began to integrate into the mass culture, Delfin disbanded the no longer provocative Malchishnik and began to try new sounds, new images, new textures - his experimental projects Dubovy Gaay'y and Misha's Dolphins stepped confidently in the direction of alternative rock, rapcore and nu-metal, which had just begun in the West, but the musician did not stay at this level for long.

After the nonconformist debut "Out of Focus" (1997) he released an album that still impresses with its freshness, power of delivery, sincerity and spirituality - "Depth of Sharpness" (1999), which significantly influenced Russian rock and hip-hop culture. The sound was innovative, mixed with bigbeat samples (in the spirit of DJ Shadow), laced with a defiant guitar onslaught à la "Nirvana", "Sonic Youth", "Pearl Jam", though one can't reproach "Depth of Sharpness" for imitation - the sound of "Depth" was so original and integral.

Developing his eclectic style, Delfin continued to move in the musical waters in 2000-2010 as well, either retreating into the obscurity of the elitist underground or suddenly surfacing on the surface of the charts. The peak of this period can be considered last year's masterpiece by Delfin "442", which announced the current political topics with its rattling guitar sound and almost completely abandoned any associations with Russian hip-hop. Apparently intentionally - in view of its principled apolitical nature, which was repeatedly noted by the protesting representatives of the Russian musical establishment, to whom Delfin joined (though not declaratively). The album "442" was praised by prominent critics (for example, Artemy Troitsky) because of its semantic and emotional relevance - it reflects the protest reflections of the past year, which had only just begun to crystallise into theses and slogans.

All fans of Delfin waited for the new album in anticipation of the appearance of a new "teacher of life", as Shevchuk or Kinchev were once. And sophisticated music lovers cheered up with intriguing anticipation: what else can Delphin surprise, if he is already at the top of the charts, with all the likes and views? Would the new album not be a throwback to the triviality of protest posing, which nowadays provides a lot of royalties to dubious stars like Pussy Riot or Little Big? Will Dolphin lose his charm as a detached thinker and insightful poet?

The album "Edge" surprised everyone - both cynical critics and devoted admirers.

Let's start with the musical side, which for Delfin has always been as significant as the lyrics. Surprisingly,
The album is completely devoid of any "trendiness": no grunting bass of dubstep, no clicking of vintage drum machines (with which Ghostemane infected absolutely all new releases that have anything to do with hip-hop). None of this is exactly the opposite. The album deliberately copies the outdated gloomy synthpop of Depeche Mode's "Songs of Faith and Devotion" (1993), almost to the point of plagiarism! The chosen sound is so out of sync with the time and expectations that it made us pay more attention to the lyrics - not only in their refined intellectual dimension, but also in their emotional and motivational one. And that's where the true intentions of such an epathetic retro approach of the musician were revealed. The synthetic sound of "spread out" guitars and "plastic" bass, strung on the Kraut-rock pulse of unsophisticated drum machines is neither a fashion challenge nor a demonstration of the artist's taste. It's a graceful accompaniment to what Dolphin wants to say and why he doesn't want to say it. He does not believe in words - Orwellian disdain for politicised textuality permeates the official music.

YouTube performance of the album (and the darkest song has the title "1984").

"In the apples of our eyes.
Special Services worms
Watching each and every one of us.
The rot of your own needs,
Spitting propaganda,
Turning inside out,
Hiding the lies one by one
Into the skulls of tin cans" ("1984").

"Truth", "facts", "meanings" - everything is the object of manipulation by the media, both official and those seeking to take the palm of superiority in the wave of Moscow protests of summer-2019. The truth is Life itself, which Dolphin has been trying to express existentially since his first albums.

"The moon is hiding diamonds
In the sorrows of its dust
On the side that's always dark -
Tears of love.
A star twinkling in the sky,
The sun of someone's dawn,
You and I are each other forever
In the Immortality of Our Love" ("J2000.0").

https://youtu.be/p_aNdkMJsho

And this inexplicable, inexpressible Life has no conditions of fulfilment in the current social conditions. Everything that drives the modern Russian - from unintelligible agreement to inexplicable protest - is the product of manipulation that turns the consumer of information into a cyborg-functionalist. Hardly anyone has been able to conceptualise the current Russian protest movement more deeply and compassionately than Dolphin. He doesn't rely on it like BG or Shevchuk, he doesn't gloat like Makarevich, he doesn't self-efface like Chistyakov. He recognises this "Protestantism" as the triumphant conclusion of twenty years of suppression of the human in man, the "swan song" of the last movements towards Right and Freedom, the empty images with which we were fed in the 1990s, and in our time we have refused to recognise any other meaning for them than propaganda....

"There's a floating corpse on a carriage,
Behind him, the dancing youths,
Through the slit of licked lips.
You can hear brains chiming.
A weeping country
Drowning in green snot,
Hope touched bottom -
Bottoms in glowing embers" ("Summer").

Everything that happens in the minds of the ideologically unformed "discontented" youth is an apotheosis of hopelessness, the way out of which is a Nietzschean colourful death that turns them into an ethereal hero for a moment before complete oblivion.

"And someone, straightening up to his full height,
He will raise his fingerless hands to the sun of victory.
A slug, a blackbird drinking from the red river
Interrupts the beating of the heart.
And falling on Moscow's slick pavement,
Or the Chinese trampled Nevsky,
The face will change to a dead avatar
The winner of a battle lost,
But a royal one!" ("Joy Stick")

That's why Dolphin relied on the soundtrack invented by the main preachers of hopelessness, prophets of meaninglessness - Depeche Mode. There is no better illustration of what is happening: a mediocre life that generates fruitless protest, leading to ignominious disappearance and oblivion. The most important thing disappears - the deepest, sincere desire, possibility and ability to Love, to which Dolphin reduces the whole essence of man.

Moreover, Dolphin does not rely on the sound of the mature Depeche Mode, nowadays once again the idols of defiantly gloomy hipsters. Delfin appeals to the darkest sound of the darkest period - the early 1990s, when we all, despite the horror of everyday life, imagined in the distance the beautiful outlines of a Russian Europe with a market economy, rule of law and civil society... It didn't work out then - it won't work out now. Plastic synthetics of digitised guitars - as channelled intentions of a modern slave of social networks; shallow beat of electropercussion - as superficiality of feelings and reflection; background sound of retro-synthesizer, seasoned with careful orchestrations - as truly Ecclesiastical fatalism: "There is nothing new under the sun, for everything that happens has already been accomplished in centuries...".

"Black on white brains
Scrawled words with crucifixion knives.
Watch the head roll on the pavement.
With a shriek of curses.
A clod of lies to blood-stained feet.
The ones who shouted:
"This world belongs to you" -
A World of Sadness..." ("MSKV").

Of course, this is a very conditional, subjective reflection of my perception of Delfin's latest album (let's play with the meaning of the word "edge") - you can't dissect a musical and textual work in such a way, especially one so integral, sounding like a single song. Dolphin diagnoses the social atmosphere in a language that does not accept variation and criticism - song. Music reflects not views and thoughts, but feelings and sensations. And there is no arguing about feelings - that is why a text clothed with music does not allow any "critical parsing". A word without music, without emotion, without feeling is a lie, just like any "spoken thought" (here Delfin shows himself a true Russian poet and philosopher). And the established skill of the modern average Russian to emotionlessly produce gigabytes of words (no matter what political colouring) is an alarming sign of spiritual rigor mortis... Dolphin captures the very spirit of our time and sets a musical monument to its figures, their desires and ambitions. And this monument, he feels, is a tombstone.

"And all we want is warmth,
And all we want is light,
After all, we are, so that our bodies
Through the ice grew into summer!" ("Summer").

The author of the article is Kirill Kungurtsev