By Nick Ostrum
Fix It If It Ain’t Broken documents the most recent meeting between Russian saxophonist and sound artist Ilia Belorukov (here on modular synthesizer) and Finnish guitarist Lauri Hyvärinen. Their relationship stretches back over a decade, though, given the musicians’ distance from each other (Hyvärinen in Helsinki and Belorukov in Saint Petersburg and, currently, Novi Sad, Serbia), it has been intermittent. According to the notes from Hyvärinen, Fix It If It Ain’t Broken is a reconciliation after several years separation (likely the result of Covid restrictions and Putin’s war on Ukraine).
The first cut, Static Pleasure, is slow-burner. A quavering ringing – evoking danger and alarm, or just something out of whack – provides its backbone, and Belorokuv and Hyvärinen lightly puncture, but really encase it with various sheaths of static, rumbling, and piercing sounds. After that, the duo settles into what must be their old rapport and engage in more open dialogs of pixelated plunks and tumbling thrums. Apart from the decomposed nature of all of this, it is playful. One imagines Belorukov and Hyvärinen frequently made eye contact, cracked smiles, feinted sounds before spitting out short scraps of noises, conducting each other to begin and stop. When they break out into louder and more continuous passages – halfway through Hair Trigger and Time After, for instance – this back-and-forth coalesces into the coarse and heavy noise that they so tantalizingly imply for most of the album. (Actually, a lot of this reminds me of the garage circuitry paste-up electronics circulating the internet and many a underground noise shows in the early 2010s, though with a more concerted balance between extremes.) They finally fill the spaces, fill the air with, well, shredding noise, before settling back into conversation mode, and the experimental minimalism (intermittent sections of rending steel, engine noises, and silence, for the most part) that characterizes the final track, God Contrast.
Fix It If It Ain’t Broken, thankfully, never gets fixed. It remains broken, and the duo embrace those shards, glitches, oscillations, gaps, redirections, detours, and (mis) communications beautifully. It is the contrasts, the imperfections, the clunkiness, and determination that make this work, or, to follow the spirit of the title, not work so well. In that, it is a wonderful success. Just turn it up loud.
Fix It If It Ain’t Broken is available as a download on Bandcamp:
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