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fROOTS
"Extreme Women"
Iva Nova mix Russian roots with art rock and beyond.
Elizabeth Kinder hears how it all works, and then sees
their spectacular live show take a festival by storm.
“We like ‘extreme women folk’,” says Katya Fyodorova (drums, percussion), founder with Inna Lishenkevich (guitars, vocals) of Russian all-girl band Iva Nova. Watching them play you can see why.
They’re out on the edge, bursting through musical barriers – folk, punk
rock, rock ’n’ roll, art rock – with an energy and talent which would have
given John Bonham a run for his money, and might get Jimmy Page practising heavy guitar riffs.
The girls are talking fast in Russian, discussing the pitfalls of musical categorisation, before Katya turns to explain: “Journalists they give us name, ‘ethno punk’, ‘speed folk’, but sometimes our songs are lyrical, sometimes they can be punk. We think ‘extreme women folk’ is better.” “Da.” Inna, nods her head in agreement. “Although,” Katya adds helpfully, “our music is not really folk music.”
Iva Nova came to the notice of fRoots for their feisty take on traditional songs from various countries of the former Soviet
Union, but now, a few personnel changes later, they play “maybe only one traditional song, from Bulgaria. We’ve written new songs and try to play those.” These songs, they say, are inspired by “the many nationalities” in Russia, and are packed full of musical surprises, from
those heavy guitar riffs to skewed blues accordeon; and as well as singing in their native tongue, they sing in Tatar, Georgian
and Bulgarian.
We’re sitting in the sylvan setting serving as backstage for the Ethnoambient festival (see fR304), where Iva Nova are headlining tonight. The interview was supposed to take place earlier, but the band were delayed on their overnight trip here following a gig in Slovakia (due, in true rock ‘n’ roll style, to an unscheduled stop by the police and a subsequent thorough search of their equipment) and when they come off stage tonight it’s straight back in the van for another, possibly less eventful, overnighter. They’re busy, a lot of people here want to talk to them; there’s a definite sense that something’s ‘happening’.
Now in the early evening, whilst the rest of the band have grabbed the chance to go and eat, Katya and Inna – who stay to get more of a feel of the place – are happy to sit under the oleander trees and talk as the river tinkles along in the background and the sound of lyres and violins warming up floats by.
Katya knows a lot of English which she speaks with a beautiful heavy accent and which she tells me she wished she knew when she was in the UK a few years ago playing drums for legendary Kraut rockers Faust. A dead ringer for Renee
Zellweger, she’s funny and patient, whilst I speak too fast and then have to repeat everything clearly.
Sorry, you were playing for Faust?!
“Da,” she nods. It turns out they were on the bill in St Petersburg where she was playing with another band. “They saw me, and after two years they write and say the drummer had hurt his back and he wanted
me to play with them. It was a good experience but only now I speak English a little.”
So who inspired you to play the drums?
“Steve Gadd. He moves me. He is a brilliant technician but he plays from the heart. I like it when people enjoy playing.” Katya was
16 when she took up drums whilst still at school. “I saw only guys playing, but thought ‘OK, I’m a woman, but why not?’”
She formed an all-girl band Babslei about nine years ago, which Inna joined, and which split up after four years. She won’t say, but intimates it was a difficult time for her. “Three of us girls said goodbye
to Babslei and quickly wrote new songs as Iva Nova.”
Chemodan, meaning ‘suitcase’, is their second album, which the band wrote and arranged together. It is, Katya insists, the result of a democratic process, and why their sound is so unusual. “One song is
going one minute this way and the next another way. Our girls have very different ideas,” she says. It’s exciting, a roller coaster
ride full of unexpected bluesy twists. Just when you think you don’t like something in a song it changes and you think it’s amazing, then three songs in and you’re hooked.
There are two lead vocals and plenty of two- and three-part harmony singing, some sexy half-spoken, half-sung verses
over a cool sliding bass, lots of dirty guitar riffs, some lyrical acoustic guitar, industrial sounds, keyboards, percussion, clapping,
whooping, screaming, horns, strings, and the ever changing moods of the accordeon; all this over brilliantly solid, musical, and driving drums.
“In Russia,” says Katya, “when people hear our songs, they dance and they scream, they are very emotional.” Emotions, the depth of them, the impact things have on your soul crop up a lot in our conversation, which strikes me as being particularly
Russian. It’s as if the weight of their country’s history is always present, deeply felt. Things can be funny, but they can never be completely lighthearted.
The rest of the band return, it’s almost time to get ready for
the gig. “Ah, there’s our bass girl, Ksenia.” Katya gestures
towards a small blonde child who cannot be more than ten. Some
mistake, surely? Following in the footsteps of that great thinker, Miss Anne Elk, I have my own theory, which is mine alone, which is that bass players are big. My second theory, also mine, which belongs to me and no one else, is that soundmen are big… and men. “She is
with Masha [Maria] our sound girl. She is very important part of the band, very talented and creative – she’s always coming up with new sounds and effects.” I look over and spot Ksenia talking to an
even more petite blonde child who might be her eight-year-old sister. It
must be difficult getting them into clubs, but it turns out everyone’s over 18 and knows what they’re doing.
Ksenia Vasilyeva has been in the band for three months, joining at the same time as Natalia Potapenko (accordeon), a petite
brunette. Both girls look as if they would-n’t be able to pick up their instruments, let alone play them with such gusto. Though as Natalia tells me, while the band drifts into the dressing room, she hadn’t realised an accordeon could be so heavy when she
was first inspired to learn it.
When was that? “I was about five years old. An accordeon player performed at nursery school I attended.” Though her parents didn’t buy her an accordeon until she was six, she went on to study music at
the conservatoire in St Petersburg. It was here, whilst studying Bach, that she discovered Astor Piazzolla…
Nastya Postnikova (vocals, percussion, keyboards) was also six when she began learning classical piano, and 17 when she
started playing in a rock band. The tallest member of the band and its most fluent English speaker, she looks most typically Russian, in that Russian model kind of way.
Nastya’s been with Iva Nova for three years, but, says Katya – as everyone changes into white clothes, to striking effect – it’s difficult getting an all-girl band together. “The line-up changes because
the girls have babies; it’s difficult to be a good mama, they say, and also to go on tour. But I can, I try to say to girls, ‘I have children and family, it’s possible’. I have two children, aged seven and four months.
My husband is mama for three weeks now, while I’m away. He’s also a musician, he understands, but in Russia, husbands don’t
like to be at home with the child. My husband is from Holland; sometimes Europeans are more progressive with regards to children. Russian men think ‘women need to be with the baby, I go to work’, it’s
only now women have more positions in Russia, only now things are changing…”
But childcare’s not the only problem in settling on a line-up.
It’s difficult to find the right person, explains Nastya. “You talk with them two times, you cannot feel the soul of this person. We all use the masks, yes? We see the beautiful lady with the good mask, when
we understand each other better, maybe she will be terrible girl.” She laughs. “It was difficult to find person who would play very emotional, who wasn’t just good technician, and who would stay. We need
emotional playing. It’s very important.”
The band seem very close, they are very affectionate with each other, there’s quite a bit of stroking and kissing and hand holding, which inevitably is giving rise to huge excitement and somewhat
fevered speculation amongst some of the blokes here, who are equally intrigued as to how the band will perform.
Their show is spectacular. It opens with Katya making industrial percussion noises into the mics around her kit, scrunching plastic bags, but when she kicks in with the bass drum and pounds her way
through the opening number you know you’re in the presence of greatness. All of them are brilliant performers, it’s difficult
to believe that this line-up has only been together for three months. There’s a subtle choreography in each song which shows that although all the girls seem lost in their own performance they are perfectly
attuned to each other as they make perfectly timed synchronised movements. It’s very cool. Art rock with a punk energy.
Back in the dressing room, Nastya told me, “We have a lot of
instrumental pieces; music is more important to us than the lyrics, that’s why it doesn’t matter if you can’t understand them, you don’t
need words to explain something, you can play it.” It seems the crowd here might agree. There’s a frenzy of excitement. Not only is it a fantastic performance, it’s girls. The question of how they might perform on stage is obviously answered. The speculation
surrounding possible off-stage activity is simply heightened.
Nastya sings one song in Georgian, because “Something in the melody sounded Georgian to us. We called it Georgian
Jazz, so we thought we’d sing it in Georgian.” Not speaking the language, she went to her local food store and asked the
people who worked there to help her with the lyrics and pronunciation. “It’s a song about the relatives,” she continues, “and love: about bad things that destroy and good things that build.”
It’s a theme in their work. Although theband don’t like the feeling of increasing political control, none of their songs have a political element. Nastya is adamant. “In our music we don’t try to make propaganda, we sing only about feelings, about nature; it’s poetry mostly about our inside world, relating to things all people feel at
some time in their lives. Everyone can understand it, in Russia especially, because they understand what went before.”
The songs have titles like The Bird, The Ivy, The Dream Of A Farmer, The City, The Sorrow, The Young Girl, Forgive Me.
Katya is keen to stress that although they sing in other languages, they’re not singing traditional tunes. It’s just that, “We think in our heads the melody is similar in some way to a tune from other country
and use that language.”
“We feel something,” Nastya adds.
“We feel the motif in our soul and know in the brain that this should be the melody.”
Having heard the songs on Chemodan performed tonight, the crowd cheer and whistle. They want more. But the band, who seem as exhilarated as everyone else by their performance, have to go.
They like to gig in Europe, they say, where it seems they resonate more with the subculture; it’s harder for them in Russia,
where gigs, are not so easy to get unless you’re pop/ rock, and TV and radio spots difficult to find unless you know someone. As a band they simply want to ‘grow’ and continue to earn a living from music; hard you’d think, in a country where piracy is so strong.
Iva Nova have not yet performed in the UK. I hope they get here soon and shake things up a bit – rare reminders that manufactured pop isn’t the only way for an all-girl group to go. It’d be great to see them on Later…. In the meantime there is the aptly named album:
Chemodan. A suitcase packed full of surprises; try going through it and you’ll pull out a few gems. “Extreme women folk is better,” says
Katya. Da.
myspace.com/ivanovaextremegirlfolk F
Photo: Judith Burrows
7:23 PM
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