EIMIC
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EIMIC

Moscow, Moscow, Russia | SELF

Moscow, Moscow, Russia | SELF
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"Everything is made in China"

How many bands from Russia can you honestly say you’ve heard of? Of those bands, how many can you say are actually good? Until a few months ago, I could honestly say “zero” and I’m sure you can’t even count them on one hand. I gave up even paying attention… until I was invited to the Illosaarirock Festival in Joensuu, Finland. Looking over the roster, I noticed one band on the 2 day long festival from Moscow called Everything Is Made In China. Awesome name. Could they actually worth listening to, though? “Probably not,” my Russian friend said “there are 3,500 bands in St. Petersburg alone and not a single one even knows how to play their instruments.”
We were both wrong. EIMIC took the stage and absolutely mesmerized the entire crowd. 1000 people stood in perfect silence as the band fill the tent with lush synths, beautiful melodies and epic, Caspian style drums keeping everyone entranced. I immediately got my hands on their debut album, 4 (2007), and didn’t stop listening for months… Now they have a new record in the works, a new video (posted below for the track “Automatic”) and a fan here in the US hoping that someone will put the record out. - www.airandseabattle.com


"Everything Is Made In China: “Automatic Movements” and Lonely Satellites"

Our last report on the Moscow outfit Everything Is Made In China was published relatively recently, in mid-October. Our text was designed to explain and advertise a new single, “Automatic.” That excellent – but small – production has now blossomed into a second album from EIMIC, “Automatic Movements.” A dedicated website has been established to help contextualize the new recording; to a large degree it develops some of the key ideas and outlook(s) that we foregrounded in October.
At that time, we explained how the band defines its ongoing raison d’etre, i.e., the way in which Maksim Fedorov, Filipp Prem’iak, and Aleksei Zotov write or perform their music. Fedorov was the most forthcoming: “We’re making the kind of music that we all like. That means combining different elements – things deriving from all manner of genres, for example post-rock or electronic music. That sort of mixture eventually comes to constitute a musical whole. It’s not just about one song…” He extended this idea of music as a dynamic flow when speaking of his compositions as a “dialog” between sounds and styles.
If these kind of shuttling or kinetic influences and performance styles take precedence over fixed, unchanging recordings, then what – for EIMIC – is the most important aspect of their live work? Once again Mr. Fedorov steps forth: “We ‘externalize’ our ideas in front of an audience – made up of people who, in turn, are ready to share those ideas.” This is the transferal of ideas from one place to another, a movement of meaning conducted between restless “dialogs” of genres.
It never stops.

And that same talk of endless transferal brings us to the idea of “automatic movements.” A quick visit to the album’s dedicated website shows us, in one simple sentence, that “Automatic movements are movements people often make without conscious thought.” Although all of the website’s images and video, designed to express this idea, show adult figures, the phenomenon of automatic movements is something that begins very early in life. Even before we are born, we know how to turn over in the womb or move along the birth canal. We know how to breathe and breast feed, as well as communicate with others using our eyes.
In most cases, then, automatic movements are designed for us take the best advantage of our environments, to operate in spaces that are safest or most beneficial. In a slightly humorous fashion, this central metaphor of knowing migration is used on EIMIC’s site to list the dates of their upcoming Polish tour. Playing first in St Petersburg, and then traveling through the major cities of a neighboring nation, is something that comes to them “automatically.” The open spaces of Poland beckon, and so the band takes good – and natural! – use of them. After that, they return home to Moscow, as a final and equally instinctual movement across the map.

Since EIMIC sing exclusively in English, we can also investigate the themes of change, travel, and dynamism lyrically, without fear of forcing a translation to serve our purposes.
The album begins, fittingly enough, with the track “Moving Fragments,” embedded below. The opening lines speak of an incipient relationship, the “gain” of another individual, and the simultaneous loss of selfhood. Being with someone, apparently, means losing “one self.” “I am lost somewhere inside of you./ Now I am a figment of your imagination./ Just imagine it./ It ends when you want it to./ I am alone in the sea of you./ [I'll] await you on shore./ No matter what we’ll have and what we’ll pay./ To keep going , keep losing one’s way.”

This may not be the happiest symbolism in the world, and indeed in the next two tracks, “The City of Airstrip One” and “Blindfold,” the lyrics waver further still in their enthusiasm for the changing scenery of amorous “displacement.” The former song expresses both joy and concern over the “red [traffic] lights” of a new relationship; the latter is clearly unnerved, amid another set of maritime motifs.
A general sense of breakdown grows; the loss of coherence looms.

“Like I am undressed/ in a public scene/ [I] try to hide my own shadow./ Just a fish out of water/that’s likely who I am… This party is not mine/ while lines look for their points,/ I don’t have time to stay in here./ Find the colors for my place/ but don’t dictate your inane taste./ I am not flying any flags,/ ’cause for me I lost mine./ Broken flowers on my way/ satellite on a lonely day./ What’s the price for suffering/ I don’t want to be yours.”

Things go from bad to worse. We’ve built the album’s first six tracks into this post, and – as you’ll hear – the degree of pessimism simply increases. What results is a serious of musings on the risk – and frequent failure – of love, a process that might be the most automatic movement of all. The album consists of eleven songs; the eighth of them, far down the running order and now contextualized by the thoughts ensconced in seven prior compositions, is “Automatic,” the single we examined in October. Three months on, with those additional seven songs/viewpoints placed beforehand, no happy conclusions have been reached.
Everything is still a blur when it comes to the opposite sex; language merely inhibits a clear view of the situation.

The single’s lyrics continue (or maybe begin) to consider the theme of love as open/uncharted waters. Entered willfully, through the initial steps of an amorous “dance,” the affair between two people leads to nothing more than a series of losses: orientation, purpose, and uniqueness all fall by the wayside. “I invite you to dance./ Farewell on water/ ’cause I don’t know what/ now to fight for./ I need something to feel./ Leave your movement/ in me/ and we stay in a line,/ full of forgotten faces.” The song ends with the same phrase repeated over and over, as if the ability of language here to grasp any internal logic has reached a total dead end: “This automatic world/ This automatic world/ This automatic world…”

It’s precisely when we reach this same dead end that something resembling clarity appears – from beyond the purview of a dictionary. It comes in the last number, running at almost twelve minutes and the last audio file in our post: “Wade In.” This song – from its title onwards – works with the same aquatic symbolism, but also offers a couple of new and telling phrases: “[I] wade in myself/ I start to cut the rope/ behind./ Wish I wrote my swan song/ in time…”
An awareness develops of responsibility, yet we’ve just declared – over and over – that these processes of commitment, risk, and “loss” are all automatic. Active choices and passive submission inhabit the same space. “Wade in myself/ stars not running late/ I’ve got the last ticket to the empty train./ It will lock me in/ the end starts at the beginning…”

That final line is very reminiscent of T.S. Eliot’s famous phrasing from “Four Quartets“: “What we call the beginning is often the end/ And to make an end is to make a beginning./ The end is where we start from.” These same words have been drawn upon in the work of Russian poetess Anna Akhmatova to equal effect and cultural renown in Russia. This was a woman who experienced the worst aspects of Stalinist repression and therefore – whatever her fatalistic views of Russian society (or her own threatened existence) – knew that the most important thing of all was to keep writing. To endure despite it all.

In fact, if our “ends and beginnings” are indeed all the same, then the one space for slightself-definition is the process or movement in between them. It’s a maddening conundrum.

To start something is to initiate its end; to begin a love affair is to bring closer its final day or failure. And yet to do nothing is to surrender all forms of freedom, to give in 100% to fate. The central paradox here, consequently, is that in order to exercise freedom and/or desire, one must “wade into” waters that will eventually swamp you. Freedom is only found in the processes of its gradual demise.
Just as we heard from EIMIC in October, rather than the overriding significance of any “one song,” their music likewise becomes more of a process, an ongoing adding and subtracting of elements, not the perfection of something static. Hence the sadness of this album, yet it’s a melancholy born of the happy(!) ability to “dance” on the edge of submission, “to cut the rope behind” oneself and enter what Freud called the directionless, “oceanic feeling”of love or great faith.

For this same reason, the final track – and the album as a whole – ends with almost six minutes of ambient, drone-like textures, devoid of vocals or clear instrumentation. This is the soundtrack to a place between the shore and vanishing forever, between choice and regret. A place of fleeting mobility, when neither one’s “end” nor “beginning” is visible. A placebetween two seashores that has no name, since it is unmapped, fluid, and boundless. In emotional or psychological terms, it’s the realm between cohesion and breakdown, where the automatic movements of social risk are played out.

To put it differently, these songs tell of the times and places where our “automatic,” unconscious desires to socialize or love go hand in hand with our worries about how to control them. No wonder that kind of face-off between spontaneity and control conjures tales of worry.
It’s the stuff of schizophren - David MacFadyen / www.farfrommoscow.com


Discography

LP:
4 (2007)
Automatic Movements (2009)

Singles:
Catch & Carry (2007)
Automatic (2009)
Parade (2012)

Photos

Bio

Everything is made in China (EIMIC) is an English- singing indie band from Moscow, Russia. In 2006 EIMIC releases EP and shortly after their tracks appeared in the Internet the band gained Russian indie-fans attention. After that all gigs in Moscow and St.Petersburgh are fully packed. At the moment EIMIC is one of the leading Russian bands.

During Summertime 2007 EIMIC records their first album called "4" on Chemical Sound Studio (Toronto, Canada). Due to band's serious approach to their music and sound quality in Summer 2008 EIMIC is invited to perform on the Heineken Open'er Festival in Poland (biggest in eastern Europe). EIMIC performs a successful gig on the 5000 Tent stage along with such artists like Cocorosie and Sex Pistols.
During 2 years of touring with the album "4" the band played lots of gigs in Russia, Baltic countries, Poland and Finland. In May 2008 "4" is released in Japan.
After several gigs in Finland "Live Nation" company books EIMIC to perform at the IlosaariRock Festival in 2009.
Summer 2009 - EIMIC records their second album again with Dean Marino at "Chemical Sound" in Toronto. "Automatic Movements" released 28th of November. Successful tours in Russia and Poland proves EIMIC high position in indie music sphere of these countries.
In June and July 2010 EIMIC performed at Be2gether, Positivus Festivals, Transmusicales, Summer in the City. In 2011 at Barents Spektakel and EXIT festivals.
March 2012 - EIMIC records a new single called “Parade”.

All the EIMIC gigs are sound+vision experience for the audience. Music is always accompanied by video art and synchronized to the music, all visual part is created by the band’s long-term collaborator Ilya Kolesnikov.