Olga Arefieva. "Anatomy"
Review of the album "Anatomy" from http://www.cha.ru June, 2001When you come out from Arefieva's concert you find yourself in a world different from the one before the concert. And you yourself are hopelessly different. You feel like you've been taken to pieces and then assembled all over again, your soul has been turned inside out, and someone has taken your eyes and switched them places. It's incomprehensible how all these people
outside can keep living just like before after this happened. Unbearable in its candor, the new double album of Olga Arefieva, "Anatomy", was recorded during two live concerts together with a great cellist and jester Peter Akimov. His cello speaks human tongues, animal voices, sometimes switching from purr to creaks that obviously come from the beyond. It accompanies the divine voice singing intrepid lyrics.
I fed myself to so many that soon
I'll be pretty apt for a museum.
Songs are almost the same as sex.
Only they don't make you pregnant.
And though my bed doesn't have any guests,
My concerts are always a sellout.
I can't play in time with the music but I keep
singing anyway.
The last time I can recall experiencing the same kind of aesthetic shock was only from Mike's "Old Wounds". Shrill, fierce, open to scalpel's kiss and the caress of anguish, the girl sings almost quietly. The one that is loud is the audience, and the applause sometimes is comparable in length with the songs. The album would be almost tragic if it wasn't for so much laughing. Just having wiped away their tears, the public begins to laugh and then to cry again. This is the life - consisting of common words in uncommon order, countless details of the existence hardly disguising inexistence, and of the unbearable happiness and grief, which would be impossible to swallow without the relish of self-irony.
Drops of sweat outlined on the forehead
Dirty, obscene little word.
To keep this tape playing and playing
You have to spin in your grave for too long.
Naked Arefieva on the cover and the anatomy of loneliness inside. Two hours of music on two discs - is it enough to turn over one inner world taken separately?
Men in tears are afraid to come up to her after the concert - they send their beautiful confused girls to give her flowers. Having told so much about herself, she still stays inaccessible, and baring her feelings she rather strips the audience. Herself slipping away to some distant color worlds:
I've written so many songs
That've nibbled myself as a bagel,
That am overwashed as a rag,
I've stolen myself from myself.
So where does this entrance left there, in the hole from the nibbled bagel, lead to?
June, 2001.
Translated by O. Bezhina