Pianist Simon Nabatov left his native Russia to pursue a musical education in the west in 1979, when he was just 20 years old – but he's continued to feel the spiritual and intellectual tug of his homeland, made manifest through a series of albums that examine and reinterpret early 20th century Russian literature. Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Brodsky's Nature Morte and Daniil Kharm's unsettling poetic epigrams A Few Incidences, have all been viewed through the prism of Nabatov's steely musical imagination, the latter two utilising the full range of Phil Minton's compendious arsenal of vocal techniques. Minton's also on board for Red Cavalry, which examines Isaac Babel's eponymous 1926 collection of brutal missives from the frontline of the Russian-Polish War, where he served as a correspondent. As one might expect, it's a sombre and sobering excursion. Babel's first tale, ‘Crossing the River Zbrucz’, opens the CD with Marcus Schmickler's ominously distorted sample of the ‘Budjonny March’ giving way to twitchy group improvisation and Minton's disquieting sing-song reportage, while on ‘The Church of Novograd’, his haunted multiphonic scream and retching epiglottals vividly suggest the horrors of war.

Recorded at the same sessions, Gileya Revisited replaces Minton with Dutch vocal improviser Jaap Blonk, and tackles the work and ideas of Gileya – a group of artists who emerged from the Russian Futurist movement around 1910. Their playfully confrontational manifesto ‘A Slap In The Face of Public Taste’ is rendered as a paranoid swirl carrying Blonk's strident exhortation to “throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky Tolstoy… overboard from the Ship of Modernity.” Blonk is the perfect vehicle for enlivening a philosophy that dovetailed with Dada and Surrealism, gleefully unleashing a torrent of unhinged glossolalia, wet raspberries and cartoonish mutterings. Even so, there's an underlying thoughtfulness at work: ‘Palindrome’ matches ludic wordplay with a delicate palindromic sketch for clarinet and piano, while ‘Shokretyts’ departs from the avant-garde, arriving in a yearning passage of lyrical jazz, with Frank Gratkowski's tenor sax offering an emotional depth that's as touching as it is unexpected.