White:
Catching the Evil Beasts. Exhibition Fedor Bastards

At an exhibition in the Erart Museum, Alexander Starostin, well known to experimental music fans under the name Theodor Bastard, acts as a universal artist. The exposition included expressive paintings, drawn from graphic sketches of a decade ago, created in the difficult moments of a cold fever. These drawings turned out to be in tune with the experimental material of the album “White: Catching Evil Beasts” by Alexander Starostin’s musical collective - Theodor Bastard, becoming its integral part.

This disc is one of the first significant works in the field of domestic ethno-electronics. Theodor Bastard created a sound-relevant work with Russian-language texts and the imagery of Russian folklore, which surprised a lot of fans who were weaned from the song tradition and accustomed to the gloomy “sound”. This fundamental work for the Russian ethno-scene is dedicated to the sound installation, which, in combination with the images of the paintings, creates an atmosphere of an ominous fairy tale.

In his graphic works, as well as in music, Fedor the Bastard refers to the experience of human interaction with the elements, to the root art, which helped to understand and accept the world. Mills inhabited by shallow evil spirits, carnivorous animals, flowers poured with blood are images that are intimidating, crowded into the depths of memory and out of use by modern man. Increasingly, parents slammed in indignation collections of Russian fairy tales, not wanting to acquaint their children with stories inconceivable in cruelty. At the same time, children who have not yet tasted all the fruits of culture are ideal recipients of archaic texts from the times of the “childhood of mankind”. They should not explain the nature of metaphors or the malicious motives for the behavior of any geese-swans. About this - the video installation “The Cuckoo” presented at the exposition, the director’s work of Fedor Svolochi. The clip was shot in Karelia in the wild during a multi-day expedition. The idea of the video is simple: our contemporary, tired of consumption and not parting with the benefits of civilization in the lap of nature, can also meet with a fairy tale. It is enough to simply turn to the mythopoetic experience of one’s childhood, when fantasy helped to know reality.

About the author:

Alexander Starostin, acting under the pseudonym Fyodor Svoloch, is a Russian multi-instrumentalist musician, composer, artist, founder and leader of Theodor Bastard, one of the oldest and most respected ethno-electronic and world music bands in Russia. For more than twenty years, the group has acquired cult status and won numerous awards, including the Russian World Music Awards and the Golden Gargoyle.

Theodor Bastard is known far beyond the borders of Russia: their albums were published in more than ten countries, and the collective gave hundreds of concerts in Europe, becoming a messenger of the Russian scene.