Annotation by Alexey Kruglov:

The album presents an audio version of the performance the Synchronization of Time dedicated to the 30th anniversary of the Engineering Center Energoservice and the unexcelled Arkhangelsk-based artist and performer Marina Grigorieva. I was happy to become a producer, composer and scenarist of this unique theatrical action which hearken back to the early 20th century during the times of the birth of the avant-garde movement and the innovative interdisciplinary collaborations. The performance took place in Arkhangelsk at the production workshop of Energoservice situated in a historical place in Russia, where the first government-instituted shipyard was located, established by Tsar Peter I in 1693. Marina Grigorieva’s paintings exposed during the time of the performance right in the center was an integral part of the project.

The literary foundation of the performance consists of detailed descriptions of the tools and equipment created by the engineers of Energoservice, as well as texts by physicist and jazz journalist Mikhail Mitropolsky and art historian and theoretician Elena Borisova. The multifaceted literary material creates an integral thread which contains the nonlinear narrative about the creation of a conditional art work or installation, which may relay both about an entire direction and about the path of human beings. The technological smoothly flows into the artistic and vice versa — the two directions of life are interconnected here and form an integrality of the production’s dramaturgy.

The performance’s musical stratum is formed by three monograms. Each of them forms the compositional basis which strings on improvisations of the participants which applies not only in the domain of sound, but also passes into the space of Karina Nesmeyanova who is a producer of the stage movement of this performance, as well as many of our projects. The participants of the action were Arkhangelsk-based musicians of the Art Quartet by Tim Dorofeev, which at various periods of time were members of the celebrated Jazz Group Arkhangelsk and Krugly Band under the direction of yours truly, and the final section of the performance was joined by Marina Grigorieva herself, as well as the best Russian jazz singer Karina Kozhevnikova, who formed a single visual-musical-plastic image with their duo.

Personally for me it was a great honor to create such a large-scale project in the city where many years ago the New Jazz direction was founded in our country. To a certain degree we are continuing the path of maestro Vladimir Rezitsky who gave a number of incredible performances in the 1970s and 1980s, along with fabulous The Ganelin Trio and Sergey Kuryokhin, who stood at the origins of instrumental theater in our country. How symbolic it was once again to find ourselves on the same concert stage together with such legendary musicians as Oleg Yudanov and Nikolay Klishin, to draw a thread of time, having connected the Arkhangelsk aesthetics of the improvisational direction, in which northern folklore is harmoniously and richly woven, with the Krugly Band`s method «Dromuse», starting from the concept of the unity of word, sound and movement, drawing new ideas in referring to ancient art! On the whole, the artistic entwinements generated during the process of the preparation turned out to be multifaceted. For example, the image of one of the main Krugly Band participants Vladimir Kruglov may be perceived as the prototype of the Energoservice general director Igor Fleyshman, vocalist Konstantin Sedovin reminds me of my assistant or mediator who reveals the temporality of various art spaces, while the abstract line in Alesya Skovorinskaya’s motion and Karina Nesmeyanova’s graphic plasticity are close to the two styles of Marina’s paintings which were presented at the exhibition at the work center. It is possible to find many such parallels and references here.

The employees of the company took part in the performance. Here it is possible to hear Alexander Popov’s remarkable whistle solo, as well as the vigor of the noise orchestras (Energoservice Noise Orchestras), where approximately twenty employees of Energoservice play on the equipment belonging to the work center — the air compressor, the drill machine, the input switching device, the the high-voltage switch, the electric disconnect device, the air-water pipes, the corrugated pipes and other equipment. The performance made use of an electrical enclosure and a crossmember plug-valve on which Marina Grigorieva went out on stage. At the same time, I was brought out on a hand electric clamp truck — you can even hear in the recording the sound of the opening gates of the work center from which I went out in the very final section of the performance. With the help of a MIDI keyboard for the first time our ensemble featured the sound of a new musical instrument — the ENMV-1 device, created by Andrey Rodionov, an engineer at Energoservice. Andrey showed his skills as an improviser during the theatricalized performance, directing the sampled sounds of the manufacturing.

The Synchronization of Time project presents itself as the System of Providing Unified Time, an important element of any automatized system of control. In this project this name of the equipment has become a metaphor of the meeting of artistic personalities from several different generations, imperceptibly stemming from the innovative ideas of the avant-gardists from the previous century, viewing them through the prism of the present-day world, directing their artistic glance into the future. Here there is a merging into one of multipolar trends and a participation of artistic people from various spheres of life. By jointly bringing together this unusual project, we hope to provide a certain impulse, which would probably induce reflections on various important and profound things. Just as Energoservice outstrips the future, likewise we, the participants of this performance endeavor to go forward, since, after all, as Elena Borisova wrote: «syncretic actions are always about the most important thing!».