Staraya Derevnya is a psychedelic / improv / kraut-folk collective based in London, Tel Aviv, and Ciudad Juarez, with one constant member: Gosha Shtasel. They got a new album, »Garden Window Escape«, recorded in 2022 in Bonafide Studios, London, with additional recordings throughout 2023 / 2024 in Israel, UK, Mexico, and Bulgaria, and out on Ramble Records and Auris Media.
skug: Staraya Derevnya have been making music for 30 years. How did your music evolve in those 30 years? Should the music of a band evolve? Or can one only do »their own thing«?
Gosha Shtasel: 30 years is a long time to sum up in a few paragraphs, but I’ll try. Staraya Derevnya started as a regular rock band back in 1994: guitars, bass, and drums, weekly rehearsals, occasional gigs, etc. We broke up around 1998, but by that time I had built my first home studio and continued working with all members of the band separately to record our first album. I moved to London in 1999 for what was supposed to be a one-year sound recording course, but one thing led to another, and I’m still here. I still visit Israel often to see family, meet friends, and play music, of course. In London I’ve continued Staraya Derevnya as a studio project. By that time early file-sharing networks like Napster opened up lots of music that you wouldn’t hear otherwise, and I became interested in experimental and improvised music. My way of work, which hasn’t changed much over the years, is to get together with a few musicians to record long and intense jams. I would then edit the recordings to come up with some sort of structure. Then we would get together again to record another layer of group improvisations on top of the old one, which would follow with more editing and so on. In 2017, Staraya Derevnya was invited to play at the Tusk Festival in Newcastle. We got together and came up with a few ideas for live shows with strong emphasis on the visual. I think this is when Staraya Derevnya stopped being a personal studio project and really became a band, or rather a collective of musicians, fine artists, and animators, where there are no fixed roles and everyone contributes. Being a large group, scattered all over the world is not easy, and we can’t do regular rehearsals, but we are constantly in touch, working on various projects and planning everything well in advance. Miguel Perez from Mexico is the latest member of our collective. I contacted him after we both played at the Virtual Music Festival during Covid. We started playing remotely, but he came to London in 2022 to record and play live.
You got a new album out, called »Garden Window Escape«. What kind of album did you want to make?
The first recording session for the new album was in 2022, but the serious work started in November 2023. It was an incredibly difficult period for everyone and although not intentionally, I think somehow it filtered through to the music. Usually, when we work on the record, the overall »theme« is not preplanned but naturally emerges along the way. I really don’t want to impose any themes or messages onto the listener, you should be free to interpret it in your own way. But defining »the theme« helps me to stay focused when making the record. So for me, »Garden Window Escape« is a »memento mori« album. It is about fear, realisation, and acceptance. But this is just my personal take, nothing more.
You call your music kraut-folk. What does that mean to you?
A few years ago, someone on Twitter called our music kraut-folk, and I thought it was spot on. It isn’t a rigid genre (we never tried to fit one), but rather a mindset plus a few influences.
Does that mean you’re looking for a certain type of realness in your work, for a way of being authentic?
We actually talked about this in the band. This could be true, but we never consciously try to fit into a definition; we simply play intuitively.
Your music sounds very full and loaded, there’s a lot going on …
I think that overloaded sound is a result of multiple layers of large group improvisation. Even after stripping away what feels non-essential – and I cut a lot – often it still feels heavy and multilayered. That said, we’re currently finishing another album, not as a full band, but as a duo, with Miguel Pérez on acoustic guitar and me on hurdy-gurdy. One of the goals is to get to the same level of intensity, but without the »wall of sound« approach.
