Hair is a sacred thing in Turkic culture like many other shamanic cultures. Hence why women braid their hair in sacred numbers such as 40, 41, 7 etc. Men having long hair is also very normal and they also braid their hair. It’s known that when Turkmens first came to Anatolia their hairstyle was seen rather strange to Anatolia’s peoples. One of the primary sources for men’s hairstyles is that gravestones that can be found in many Turkic countries.
In early August 2001, I set down my bag in a simple dormitory in the village of Bol’shie Koty on the coast of Siberia’s Lake Baikal. “We each get a bed, cupboard, and closet space, and there’s a cool Russian stove. Our room overlooks the lake!” I enthused in my journal. Bol’shie Koty, whose 150 summer residents dwindle to only 80 in the deep Siberian winter, is, like many communities along the nearly 400-mile-long lake, accessible only by boat. The crescent-shaped lake is the world’s deepest (over a mile), the world’s oldest (at least 25 million years), and holds the most water of any lake (around 22% of the planet’s fresh surface water). Unique as well as superlative, Baikal hosts hundreds, if not thousands of animal species found nowhere else on earth, including sponges, fish, amphipods, and a freshwater seal. In remote southern Siberia, its watershed drains vast expanses of Mongolian steppe and Russian taiga, and the lake holds a somewhat mythical place in Russian culture. As part of the inaugural expedition of the Wellesley-Baikal program, which paired a spring course on Baikal history, literature, and ecology with summer study at the edge of the lake, I had rejoined my classmates after graduating from Wellesley and spending a summer in my home state of Vermont.
Over three weeks we explored the lake and its surrounding towns and forests, taking water samples and plant inventories and meeting local scientists, artists, land managers and even a shaman with a double thumbnail. On that gravelly shoreline, while also at the figurative shore where college meets adulthood, I was enchanted by the ways this place burst with both novelty and familiarity, and I immersed myself in observation to make connections between them.
On our misty boat ride to Bol’shie Koty, I saw eerie expanses of ghostly, bare tree trunks near the head of the Angara River, the bare, pointy stems resulting from an intense local outbreak of Siberian silk moth caterpillars. I was fresh from a field technician job counting invasive insects and inventorying disease in white pine stands for the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks, and Recreation, and diligently took photos for my boss back home.
A few days after, I observed a female Siberian silk moth, “a beautiful creamy shimmery color with delicate folds,” alight on our boat in the lake, whose water looked “almost glacial in its deep blue green, slightly milky texture.” As I watched from where my classmates and I were taking samples, “one moth took off from our boat and flew valiantly toward shore, only to come closer and closer to the water until finally landing, becoming a creamy speck on the blue-green Baikal waters.” Later, I felt an odd surge of recognition - as well as horror - when one of us turned back a bedspread (“of a smooth cotton and muted brown/blue/purple/pale pink weave”) to find the grayish, fibrous lump of a silk moth cocoon. The caterpillars of Dendrolimus superans sibiricus defoliate Siberia’s characteristic coniferous forests, devouring needles of tamarack, pine, spruce, and fir.
Twenty years later, I’m back in Vermont, reading these somewhat overwrought - and repetitive! - words of my younger self while the larvae of Lymantria dispar (their common name, ‘gypsy moth’, is a derogatory ethnic slur) devastate trees around me during one of the worst outbreaks in Vermont in 30 years. Lymantria dispar larvae, like their distant Siberian cousins, feed on trees that distinguish Vermont’s forested landscape, though they defoliate oaks and other hardwood trees rather than the needle-leaved conifers that the Siberian caterpillars eat. I work as an ecologist and spend much of my time on projects that protect another huge lake, Lake Champlain, and its watersheds. I still love Russian literature, saunas, and dill, my appreciation for all of which sharpened during my time at Baikal. The world changed forever just three weeks after we returned from the far side of it that year. Yet in my own life, throughlines from those days along the crumbling shoreline continue to surface and reverberate in the present. Like the fine threads of a Siberian silk moth cocoon, these connect my past and present selves, shaping and in turn being shaped by perspectives and decisions that continue to unfold.
I couldn’t have articulated it at the time, but on rereading my excruciatingly detailed journal, I can see that this trip to Russia was the first time that I, at age 21, saw myself as a witness to and participant in the churning path of history, rather than merely a visitor to museums and ruins clearly separating past and present. Opposing truths can exist at the same time, the past continually bumps up against the present, and these moments and impressions form part of an unfolding and messy whole.
I marveled at juxtapositions. The beauty of the silk moths and the devastation of the forests in their wake. Wild-looking river deltas along the lake, thick with larch and cobble, that were in fact just decades out from the ecological and human devastation of slave-powered gold mining and deforestation. The expanse of lake viewed from an old rayon factory in Baikalsk, where I pondered a failed Soviet scheme to make airplane tires from wood pulp. A wolf wandered the shoreline and lynx pelts adorned the walls of a village home. Cows wandered the lanes and wooded margins of Bol’shie Koty, while rough fences kept livestock out of yards instead of in pastures, where they would have been in my familiar Vermont. Yet this surprising settlement pattern recalled early New England villages modeled after those in England, where overgrazing of common areas inspired the ecological and economic concept of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ in the mid-nineteenth century.
In Russia I saw academic concepts like this embodied in the land and lives around me, and the contrasts activated my thinking. Primed by the wide-ranging spring course with Tom Hodge and Marianne Moore, big thinkers with endlessly curious minds, I filled my journal with lists of plants, records of weather, notes from lectures and questions to consider.
One day our group got to witness the value of a long-term journal first hand. Talking with biologist Lyubov Izmesteva, in her dusty lab, we learned that her grandfather, Mikhail Kozhov, had begun recording ecological data on the lake in 1945, offshore from Bol’shie Koty. He passed the pen to his daughter and now granddaughter, and their collective decades of observation yielded a unique record of the lake’s health. Marianne Moore recognized the value of this careful record in 2001 and has shared it more broadly in the years since that trip. Reaching through and beyond the Soviet era, this family project is now helping the rest of the world understand how climate change is impacting Baikal.
Though I lacked a deep grounding in Russian political history, I felt a momentum in Russia, which seemed like it was still actively turning a corner from the drudgery and oppression of the Soviet era toward the complexities of democracy and capitalism. I knew the forested hills, river valleys, and watery depths around me held painful histories, like the cut-short lives of “uncounted, unregistered hundreds [of political hostages], unidentified even by a roll call” deliberately drowned in Baikal around 1920 as part of Russia’s post-revolutionary, pre-Stalinist horrors, and described by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago. In Moscow in 2001, I snapped a photo of a billboard advertising chewing gum, looming over a Soviet-era statue. The frivolity of the gum, its promise of a tiny personal diversion, seemed to contrast in a fascinating way with the stern Communist officer on his horse, frozen in metal.
In Moscow, I wrote, “Miles & miles from the city center are 6-lane streets, long apartment buildings, stores (many for furniture/home furnishings), people strolling, hurrying or waiting, painting, digging, talking, rolling out sod, carrying wallpaper, buying clothes, selling watermelons, riding bikes, doing exercises, kissing”. The pendulum seemed to be swinging toward growth and expansion. Yet other pieces just hadn’t caught up yet. I remember a car pulling another car on a busy city street with only a thick piece of rough twine, goldenrods and tall grasses adding a surprising wildness to the edges of city sidewalks, the shopkeeper in Bol’shie Koty calculating change with an abacus. I observed these dynamics with curiosity and delight.
In 2021, Baikal is an Instagram backdrop and Russia, presided over by a former KGB officer, a shaky mix of democracy and authoritarianism. I haven’t been back, but I wonder if the residents of that busy Moscow street still feel the forward-looking momentum I observed. Are they still carrying wallpaper and rolling out sod, shaping their spaces? As influencers filter images for fantastic effect and shadows of the Soviet era continue to loom, I can’t find the photos I took with film on that trip, or the paper (the last of my college career) that I wrote by hand on the porch at Bol’shie Koty. I still keep methodical notes about land for my job, but my personal journal these days contains mostly scattered thoughts on parenting, relationships, and career, quotes from podcasts, and conceptual brainstorms. I write in it to get ideas out of my head and process the complex dynamics of life, not to record anything for posterity. But in reflecting on Baikal two decades later, I realize my younger self gave me a gift in the form of her obsessively detailed notebook. She helped me decipher the throughlines that connect me to her, through a trip we both took to the other side of the world. My work now is to figure out how to pay this gift forward, to whatever selves come next.
The Buryats are an indigenous people of the Siberian forests. They fought against - and became subjects of - the Mongolian empire in the 1200s and the Russian empire in the 1600s.
Milt Gross was an influential newspaper cartoonist who earned fame during the American Great Depression. Prior to his newspaper career, he directed silent animated films for Bray Studios.
While the first battles of World War I were being fought, Maria Czaplicka was travelling the Yenisei Province of Siberia to study ways of life north of the Arctic Circle. Maria spent much of 1914-15 in this little-studied region, recording the lives and languages of the people she met.
Born in 1884 in Russian-dominated Warsaw, Maria was one of the young Poles to study with the “Flying University”, an underground organisation which between 1885 and 1905 secretly provided education for men and women alike. In 1910 she was awarded a Mianowski Fund scholarship. This enabled her to travel to England to study at Bedford Women’s College, London; and then at the University of Oxford as a member of Somerville College. She was awarded the Oxford Diploma in Anthropology in 1912.
In Oxford, where she was a contemporary of O.G.S. Crawford, she studied under Robert Marett, who encouraged her to review the available literature on the indigenous populations of Siberia. This work was published in 1914 as Aboriginal Siberia: a Study in Social Anthropology. In his forward to the book, Marett identified its importance as making accessible for the first time in English the Russian language work on the subject. The book became the major reference work on these communities of Asian Russia.
This region was little understood especially by contemporary British anthropologists who tended to focus their research on parts of the British Empire. Maria’s pioneering expedition to north-west Siberia began in May 1914. Maud Haviland (ornithologist), Dora Curtis (artist), and Henry Usher Hall (University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology) met Maria in Moscow. They travelled by train to Krasnoyarsk, the regional administrative capital. From there, a three week journey by paddle-steamer north up the River Yenisei took them 1,500 miles to Golchika. It was late June, but the boat had to negotiate ice floes on the river. They spent the short Summer above latitude 70ºN in the tundra around the Yenisei estuary, exploring the people and the archaeology of the area. Maria collected objects from the people they met, and from the platform burial sites on the permafrost; took photographs; gathered plant specimens and mammoth bones; and wrote down her experiences.
Maud and Dora left at the end of the Summer. With Michikha, a Tungus (Evenki) woman, Maria and Henry spent Winter 1914/Spring 1915 travelling the mountainous area east of Turukhansk. Although Maria made light of the conditions in her book My Siberian Year, she experienced considerable hardships and illness through the Arctic Winter. Meals were eaten with nomadic reindeer-herding families; “Armed with this [knife] I caught hold of the meat with my teeth, and sliced off a mouthful, which I proceeded to masticate as well as its parboiled condition would permit”. The miles of walking and sledding from tent to tent were exhausting. Frostbite was an ever-present danger despite being “ensconced in a foot-bag made of the winter coat of a reindeer buck, and cased in thick Jaeger stockings worn inside a pair of dog’s-hair stockings and two pairs of hairy skin boots.”
Maria made a special study of shamanism and religion in the region, and also commented on the history and politics of Siberia. She also wrote poetically about the short days in the Winter landscape, “There is a rosy light that was never anywhere else by land or sea, that flushes the mountain peaks of the ‘stony’ tundra to an ineffable glory during the brief twilight days that precede the return of the sun in the spring, while the valleys and the lowlands are filled with a blue sea of unlifting shadow.” After her return to England in 1915, the objects she had collected with Henry were deposited in the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Pennsylvania University Museums, and the botanical specimens in the Fielding-Druce Herbarium (Oxford).
Maria seems to have completed some war work for the British Foreign Office’s War Trade Intelligence Department. In 1916 she became the University of Oxford’s first female lecturer in anthropology. Her three-year appointment came to an end in 1919. She toured the United States to meet leading anthropologists. In 1920 she was awarded the Royal Geographical Society’s Murchison Award, and she obtained a year-long teaching position at the University of Bristol. Sadly this promising career was cut short when Maria committed suicide in May 1921, a few days after her naturalisation certificate was issued. A fund in her memory was established at Somerville College. Her collected works, edited by David Collins, were republished by the Curzon Press in 1999.
Home Office (1921) HO 334/92/8081 Naturalisation Certificate: Marie Anteinette Christine Elizabeth Lubicz de Czaplicka. From Poland. Resident in Bristol. Certificate A8081 issued 24 May 1921 [The National Archives] http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C11938471
This 39,000 year old baby female, named Yuki, was found with blood still in her veins, frozen in the permafrost on a Siberian island. It is the first successful extraction of blood from an extinct animal. A team of Russian and Japanese scientists is hoping to clone one sometime in the future.
Having reviewed Morita Vargas’ 8 a few weeks ago, I’ll now turn my attention towards another standout release from Hidden Harmony Recordings, which is Maria Teriaeva’s Conservatory of Flowers. As her main tool, Teriaeva employs a Buchla 200e modular system, and throughout Conservatory of Flowers, she wrestles and wrangles some incredible tones from this singular synthesizer palette. Though the LP additionally features field recordings, bass flute, cello, trumpet, sax, guitar, and voice, you’d be forgiven for thinking there were mallet instruments and thumb pianos, timpanis and tubas, seed shakers and hand drums, and much else besides, for Teriaeva configures her sorcerous electronics into a polychromatic display of instrumental emulation. Which is not to say that the Buchla isn’t also used for purposes of angelic ambient, sci-fi strangeness, or dissonant drone, and indeed, the compositions here are as experimental as they are immediate, as Teriaeva and her collaborators weave together threads of avant-garde sound design into concise song structures that are at once madcap and dexterous, and that turn often and unexpectedly into far out sonic realms…with passages of futurist forest folk or deviant pop ecstasy plunging suddenly into shadowy abysses of strings and bass synthesis, only to then rush back towards the light. Taking in the full experience, my mind drifts to Kate NV, to Ryuichi Sakamoto, and to Yasuaki Shimizu, though there is a level of gleeful experimentation on display that also evokes the works of Museum of Modern Art, Georgia, and Michelle Mercure. But these are only vague signposts, and in truth, the sonic world of Conservatory of Flowers is utterly unique…a rhythmic and percussive paradise of organic instrumentations and exotic synthesizer colorations that only gets more compelling—and more strange—with each listen. And though the original tracks are great enough, the album also includes a gonzo remix of “Spritz” from Sapphire Slows, which stitches together chopped vocals, stuttering house beats, funk basslines, and mutating rave chords into an anxious expanse of alien club euphoria.
Maria Teriaeva - Conservatory of Flowers (Hidden Harmony Recordings, 2020) “The Jungle in June” opens the album with panning clicks evoking crystalline insect wings, flowing layers of underwater ambiance, and gemstones melting in place as they merge with shimmering clouds of ether. Kalimba and marimba tones sourced from Teriaeva’s Buchla join together with sub bass percolations that inhabit a zone between kick drum and bassline, and subtle pitch shifts send lysergic wavefronts through the air. As the deep sea ambiance recedes, it is replaced by gusts of granular wind, and all around, modular idiophones and hyperspeed panning effects dance together, with the mix minimal, spacious, and leaving plenty of room for a ceremonial beat to work the body. And at the end, pallid pads glow in oceanic hues while hovering in place, holding to no particular key until the whole mix disappears in a flash. Broken transmissions and twinkling metals introduce “Paris Texas,” with everything moving back and forth across the stereo field at varying speeds. Melodies attempt to form and subtle progressions are hinted at within the sparkling drone clouds; reverberating fx trail off through guttural breaths and demented echoes; and somewhere in the murk sits the bass flute of Sasha Elina, though it merges in totality with Teriaeva’s modular sound maze. What then develops is a world of polyrhythmic magic, with a multitude of sequences and woodwinds pinging left to right while accelerating in tempo. The sonic spectrum overflows with lightspeed pulsations and flourishes of minimalist magic, with machines hissing like snake tails and crazed idiophone patterns careening at random…like a drunken cloud of cicadas moving according to no particular logic. And at some point the mix seems to reduce slightly in intensity, which gives space to alien frog croaks and mysterious hints of voice.
Rainbow-hued squelches dance at the start of “SØS” and dissonant blasts of metalloid haze slowly resolve into a tuba-esque progression. Starshine sequences and electronics like malfunctioning bird calls enter the stereo field as the piece settles into a drunken waltz, one led by a two-note bassline that lands with Lynchian energy…think 50s pop slowed to a dopamine crawl. As the bass groove disperses, space is left for synthetic percussions to pop and sickly leads to buzz amidst wisps of galactic light, and after the track changes vibe once more, dramatic and Buchla-generated idiophone descents join ceremonial drums while outer-dimensional liquids wash all around. Shifting again, we return to seasick sequencing and that Twin Peaks-indebted bassline, which sets up a magical merging of the various pieces of the song…a madcap layering of waltzing 50s sci-fi mesmerism built from squelching synths and squarewave bass throbs, rainforest percussions and modular mallet melodies, and melting streaks of starshine…the result an abstract dance of alien balearica, which is not unlike the weirder works of artists such as Pharaohs, Stratus, and Shelter. Next comes “Spritz,” which starts with cello strings bowing in hypnotic ecstasy before the mix explodes, seeing Vasiliy Yanik’s saxophone and Nikita Shishkov’s trumpet snaking in celebration through the manic choir vocalizations of Vadik Korolev…the whole thing pulling my mind to the work of Yasuaki Shimizu. A sharp transition cuts the track down to splattered and heavily effected string clatter, pounding bass, and reverberating snap patterns as hints of the euphoric sound orgy preceding start building back in strength. Horns converse and bowed cellos generate sunrise colorations before devolving into a shimmering display of spectral metal, and eventually, the manic Shimizu-style avant pop dance returns in full strength. But just as quickly, the track breaks down again…back to the world of broken electro-string skitter, ritualized percussion, and expressive sax, trumpet, and string accents. The vocals build around with wondrous “AY-YA-YA” chants until the spectrum is overwhelmed by sheets of percussive detritus, and after devolving further towards masculine breathing and wheezing whooshes of neon static, Yana Chekina’s cello detunes wildly while scraping and crawling towards the sky.
In “How Are You Feeling?” percussive sequences tick through cut up samples sourced from the Russian Bird Conservation Union, with the whole thing sounding like a transmission from some broken satellite. Synthetic water drums pan across the spectrum while holding a hypnotizing body flow and strange melodies are carried by blinding currents of feedback and searing sonar blips. At once the vibe changes, seeing detuning waves of orchestral synthesis billow out from the center of the universe in a way that recalls the terrifying kosmische expanses of Klaus Schulze’s Irrlicht,or perhaps Tangerine Dream’s Zeit. Then, following this expanse of viscous darkness, we suddenly return to a jungle of peace and light, wherein birds resume singing amidst insect chatter while idiophones play lullabies to the rising sun. Sub bass currents move with propulsive energy and crazed comets streaks across the sky as the body swings back and forth in a state of mirth, though touches of melancholy softly kiss the melodic progressions. “A Sunlit Room” closes the first side with bowed strings and clattering clouds of madness that soon give way to an Afro-folk synth bounce, which is accented by fizzing bodies of liquid effervescence. Strange echo trails skitter down reverberating hallways and morphing blasts of air land throughout the spectrum as the main synth progression filters wildly and eventually, the songs seems to fall apart while simultaneously increasing in intensity, as Yana Chekina’s bowed cello strings underly layers of bouncing melodic mesmerism…a child-like hook that works itself deep into the brain and again evokes Yasuaki Shimizu, though Teriaeva’s concoction is altogether stranger than anything he might compose. Higher pitched electronics move with hesitation, percussive layers like the motions of nervous insects wash across the mix, and those Afro-kosmische synths again filter out of control while bouncing bleeps and bloops drop like globules of starlight. Then following a pause, there’s an explosion of bowed strings and bass electronics, which together execute an alien dream dance within a world of panning rhythmic skitter and anxious radar accents…all as white noise winds blow and liquids vaporize into polychrome ether.
The B-side opens with “Abstract” and its cavernous spaces suffused through by twinkling crystals and glimmering alloys. Percussive accents shift in pitch…their effect like liquids dripping into neon pools…and a shadowy hand drum rhythm builds up as the sparkling sound cascades lessen in magnitude, while also locking into the rhythmic flow. What emerges is something not unlike Vague Imaginaires’ “L'essor du roraima,” especially as we settle deeper into a slow and low tribal drum ritual overlaid by clouds of futurist magic, wherein polyrhythmic metals are structured into a brain-bending flow. Dissonant sirens emerge from the distance, wavering cascades of mutating light melt upon the mix, and a pounding bass drum holds down the beat through layers of feverish delirium before the track breaks apart, leaving sickly wavefronts of droning skree and currents of nacreous noise to merge into a malarial fog. Next comes “14’19” and its clockwork sequences, which morph through maddening fx that spread and pan the sounds into psychedelic zooms and spectral whooshes. The sequential patterns take on a rougher and noisier tone as pitch-bending sirens enter the stereo field, and eventually, everything settles into a harmonious wall of droning chords that periodically detunes…the effect creating waves of warbling wow’n’flutter that spread out towards infinity. Delay feedback manipulations generate industrial screams and dizzying whirlpools that surround the spirit, and as the piercing sirens tones pulse continuously in one ear, their decay trails are caught and reversed in the other. Billowing blankets of distorted synthesis bend towards dissonance before dispersing and eventually, the song changes in vibe, seeing mutating sequences bounce joyously back and further under heavy filtering and modulation…the motions and tones causing the mind and body to lose all sense of space-time. Pads awash in orchestral majesty hover in place before plunging down in pitch, and flubby brass arps emerge then cut away as we return to the introductory world of ticking sequences and searing siren screams.
A long stretch of silence leads to a secret track, which features FM bells decaying in the wrong direction alongside subtle clusters of industrial breath. Methodic bass patterns and the patient beat of a subaquatic drum are at odds with the anxious bodies of chaos swirling up above,..these howls of metallic noise and drone that merge into a discontinuous storm cloud, wherein evocations of things heard before now modulate, distort, and flow backwards in time. As well, the end of the B-side also contains a special remix of “Spritz” by Sapphire Slows. Entitled “Spritz-Spritz,” the track begins with detuning sirens blasts and swelling vortices of vibration, while snaps hold down a sparse rhythm. Cyborg string plucks spread out into fractal structures, bulbous basslines move underneath the flow, and a kick drum adds a body-bobbing club energy as spacey sequences descend then disperse. Double-time cymbals flow in from silence and ricocheting dub flourishes wash side to side…the vibe low slung and delirious, especially as snares drop at the end of each measure. Rhythms pull away as psychotic rave chords pitch-shift and pulse overhead, and the vocals of Vadik Korolev are cut up and repurposed amidst popping percussive sequences. The kick drum returns—though now the beat stutters anxiously through abstracted fogs of snare—and eventually, a start/stop hypno-rhythm takes over, led by slinky funk basslines, ticking shaker tones, and conglomerations of oscillation that seem to bubble up from sub-earthen depths. Blistered leads burn across the mix as the vocals pull away, leaving behind a strange world of animalistic synthesis. And when the cut-up choral accents return, they pulse in tandem with the militant flow of detuning rave chords…the result another expanse of club delirium, though as before, the vibe is angular, off-kilter, and increasingly extra-terrestrial.
