My songs

The duo Otvaal read manuscripts and typescripts from Garage Archive Collection as scores, turning poetic texts into bard songs.

Bringing together the artistic and the profane, the absurd and the everyday, spoken word and chanting, Otvaal paint a bizarre world of cats that speak in fables, where Thomas Mann’s novels and free improvisation dwell side by side. Their song compilation consists of fragments of conceptualist poetry, chosen instinctively and reinterpreted through music. Among them are Genrikh Sapgir’s «Farewell to the Sofa,» Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe’s counting song «We Did 1, 2—the Head Fell off...,» Ivan Sotnikov’s instruction songs «My Songs (AYA. Ay-ya-ya-ya),» and poems by authors from Kuban, Novosibirsk, and Leningrad.

Cover image: photo provided by Roman Zharov

About the Artists

Otvaal is an avant-pop duo. They bring the song tradition together with a contemporary left-field sound and elegantly combine the accessibility of radio hits with sound-art experiments.