Iamthemorning
More songs about Victorians and death from the cheery chamber proggers.
When Marjana Semkina was a child, her father worked at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, a vast facility located on the Kazakhstan steppe, about 2000km southeast of Moscow. For over half a century it’s been central to the Soviet then Russian space programmes: it’s where the first Sputnik satellite was launched, and where the Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was based before being catapulted into the heavens. It’s also a grim, poisonous place, where the locals report high levels of cancer, and toxic chunks of scrap metal dot the landscape.
“I spent my first years there in terrible poverty,” says Semkina, safely ensconced in her apartment in St Petersburg. “A terrible climate. No rain. So much desert. No food. No money. No clothes.”
For a while, it didn’t get much better. Next stop was Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, a city currently most famous for being a distant, unwanted destination for football teams playing in the unglamorous Europa league. One of its main tourist attractions is the interactive Chak-chak Museum, where visitors can learn to make dough balls baked in honey. Culturally speaking, it’s something of a vacuum.
All of this makes the existence of Semkina’s chamber prog outfit Iamthemorning feel like something of a miracle. The two-piece project (pianist Gleb Kolyadin makes up the other 50 percent, but Semkina is very much the publicfacing half of the duo) are fleshed out by a floating coterie of established musicians including Porcupine Tree/King Crimson drummer Gavin Harrison and Riverside frontman Mariusz Duda, and they’re now four studio albums into a career that’s seen them gather momentum in Europe while being largely sidelined at home. They’ve also earned Semkina an “exceptional talent” visa in her passport that allows her to set up home in the UK. She wants to live near the sea. Which is about as far from Baikonur as you can imagine.
New album The Bell is Iamthemorning’s most complete work, an imaginative swirl of rock, folk and classical music, delicate and dramatic, with Kolyadin’s piano underpinning Semkina’s beautiful, often haunting vocals. It’s also a dark album illuminated by moments of striking brightness. Much of that darkness comes from the lyrics: it opens with the line ‘No one seems to care that I break into millions of pieces’ and climaxes with a song about being buried alive. And while this
might not come as a total surprise – the band’s last album, Lighthouse, which won the Album Of The Year award at the 2016 Progressive Music Awards, was a journey through the travails of mental illness, much of it based on Semkina’s own experience – this time around it’s less personal, and perhaps more ambitious.
“Lighthouse was me all over,” says Semkina. “The Bell is less so because I decided to take a more detached approach, and not take it too close to my heart. Because of this, and because of all the Victorian themes, the album is a bit more theatrical.”
Ahh, yes. The Victorians. The concept of the album is built around the culture of the Victorian era, weaving a fabric drawn from the pages of art and history books. Subjects covered include Victorian freak shows, Anatomical Venus cadavers bursting with entrails, serial killers, spousal abuse, dead bodies lying on riverbanks, and still more death. All this misery may make it sound like the bleakest album you’re ever likely to hear, but such is the balletic lightness of the delivery – Kolyadin’s tumbling chords and Semkina’s seraphic voice – that even the album’s most traumatic visions are imbued with a pure, almost heavenly hue.
And if you’re thinking that all this drama and tragedy and hopelessness sounds stereotypically Russian, it’s a point Semkina is willing to concede.
“We are surprisingly Russian,” she says.
“All my life I’ve been trying to run away from this country, and I’ve finally managed to do that, but working on The Bell made me realise how deeply Russian we are, and how rooted we are in the classical school. And even though I don’t have a classical education like Gleb, I’m being dragged back there in terms of being inclined towards drama in my writing.
“I’d been listening to a lot of classical music, and one of things I really liked was a song cycle by Shostakovich called The Songs And Dances Of Death. When I came to think about this album, and about its influences, I realised that songs and dances of death are so incredibly what we do. I’d never thought of Shostakovich in the context of my deep fascination with all things morbid, but there’s one part of the song cycle where he describes a dying child in detail, and I thought, ‘Now that’s interesting!’ So I guess we are deeply rooted in our Russian heritage.”
So the Russian media must love Iamthemornihng, right? All that death and despair? And a heart-warming story of a local boy and girl made good? Wrong.
“We have to prove to every single journalist that we’re not shit,” says Semkina. “We have quite a big portfolio now. We have Gavin Harrison playing on our albums and Tori Amos’ engineer mixing our albums. None of this means anything to these people, and I am way too old and tired to pretend that
I’m worthy of their attention. So I’m just going to leave.”
Russia’s loss is the UK’s gain, for The Bell is something of a masterpiece, and while it might have its roots in the Victorian era, there are parallels with modern society that don’t always make for comfortable listening.
“Lighthouse was me all over. The Bell is less so because I decided to take a more detached approach, and not take it too close to my heart.”
Take opening track Freak Show, for instance. Ostensibly it’s about the 19th century exhibitions where curious people of all classes would flock to stare at people with “abnormal” traits, some of who became world famous:
The American midget General Tom Thumb, whose funeral drew 20,000 people. Chang and Eng Bunker, the original Siamese twins. Miss Rosina, born without arms and legs, who performed as a mermaid but also learned to crotchet using her feet. If you were different, you were a spectacle. And if that sounds like much of reality TV, well, that’s the point.
“It’s a metaphor for modern society, and how we take an interest in the darkest and most weird things,” says Semkina. “I remember how shocked I was to switch on the TV and see a show about people that weighed 300 kilos. People with health problems, and we’re entertaining ourselves by watching them trying to get by. There are a lot of examples in modern society. If you look at the Victorian era from above, you can see how far we’ve come in terms of cultural and technological progress, but I’m not sure how much better we are. We’re hypocrites. We pretend we’re highly civilised and decent, but late at night we’re stalking people online and trolling people on YouTube.”
Do you see hope?
“No. I never see hope. I am from Russia.”
One of the downsides of the technological progress that’s supposed to make our lives easier is that it also serves to make us busier. The modern musician is also an online marketeer, a social media manager, a fulfiller of merchandise orders. Semkina does all of this, and she also has a Patreon account. As part of the deal that saw that UK visa stamped in her passport, the Home Office needs to be shown that Marjana actually makes an income from her craft, and Patreon is perfect for that. The company was set up so that artists of all types – musicians, illustrators, animators, videographers, podcasters, game makers – can receive continuing financial support from their fans. You become a patron, and for a monthly fee you get access to things that non-paying fans don’t.
In Semkina’s case it’s acoustic cover versions – in June patrons were able to watch her perform Porcupine Tree’s My Ashes – as well as intimate livestreamed shows, unboxing videos, even bedtime readings. It works, but it wasn’t easy.
“I have crippling self-esteem issues,” says Semkina. “I always thought that I wasn’t good enough to be asking for money from people for things that I do, especially if it wasn’t funding an album but just kind of helping me out with my personal projects.
“It’s a great experience. I have a very lovely bunch of people. I actually have a livestream for them tomorrow – I sing, and we talk – and it’s just so lovely, like a bunch of people getting together in the living room drinking tea and singing songs, but online. All of them
“I remember how shocked
I was to switch on the TV and see a show about people that weighed 300 kilos. People with health problems, and we are entertaining ourselves by watching them trying to get by.”
are extremely supportive, and I’m so happy that I got myself to do it. I really hope that it keeps growing, because it gives me a lot of motivation to be more active.”
Anyone who makes origami birds to raise money for animal shelters can’t be all darkness and despair, and Semkina isn’t. She’s witty in conversation, and there are moments of gallows humour in the album that are laugh-out-loud funny. In Sleeping Beauty (the song about the Anatomical Venus), Semkina borrows the
‘here comes a chopper to chop off your head’ line from the nursery rhyme Oranges And Lemons, and she somehow contrives to rhyme ‘hers’ with ‘hearse’ in Six Feet, a song inspired by the doomed relationship between Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the poet who founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and Elizabeth Siddal, fellow poet and artists’ model. It’s a story of heartbreak, obsession, infidelity, grief and laudanum addiction. It’s also a story of death, of course.
After Elizabeth died, Dante buried her with a volume of poetry, but years later had the corpse dug up so he could make money from the unpublished verse. Rumour has it that when the coffin was opened, it was filled with Elizabeth’s hair, which had continued to grow after her death.
Semkina has put her own spin on the original tale. “In my story, Dante buries Elizabeth alive,” she says. “She wakes up and discovers she’s in a coffin.”
That’s where the bell comes in: during the 1840s, a spate of horrifying stories about premature burials spread, so people requested interment in so-called safety coffins, devices that included a signalling system allowing any waking occupant to alert passers-by to their predicament.
So what does she hope fans will get from The Bell, and from these grim tales?
There’s a long pause.
“Maybe some of them will think it’s a little bit strange and unconventional at first,” she says. “But they should give it time to grow.
“It’s happened to me with other musicians, and it was a very good learning curve for me: to learn that the creative choices of musicians I love are worth trusting, because I love those musicians for a reason.”
The Bell is out now via Kscope. See www.facebook.com/iamthemorningpage for more.