In 2002, California-based musician and composer Christian Kiefer released Exodust, a lovely full-length instrumental evocation of the Dust Bowl and the subsequent westward migration of impoverished Depression-era families. For his latest release, Czar Nicholas Is Dead, Kiefer turns his narrative attention to a new continent and another cheery episode of 20th century history-- the 1918 assassination of Czar Nicholas Romanov and his family at the onset of the Russian Revolution. As with Exodust, the album uses a minimalist construction of guitar, strings, and electronics to effectively summon the ghosts of the past, as Kiefer strives to recognize the essential humanity of individuals swept away upon the cold, indifferent tides of history.
Earlier this year, Kiefer released The Black Dove, a collaboration with UK folk singer Sharron Kraus. That collection featured a folk-inspired song cycle centered upon a doomed love affair, but aside from its evocative instrumentation and general narrative thrust it contained little that could anticipate the quiet, lonesome grandeur of Czar Nicholas Is Dead. Although the album does conclude with a startling vocal reconstruction of the folk song "Troika", it otherwise makes few recognizable allusions to traditional Russian music. In fact, Kiefer employs several instrumental elements-- keening fiddle, twangy guitar reverb, funeral-march percussion-- that many listeners have been conditioned via film soundtracks to identify with the geography of the American Western. Yet throughout the album, Kiefer makes enough strategic use of silence and empty space to sufficiently envision the vast, bloodstained Russian snowfields, creating a static aural landscape whose looming desolation often seems to eclipse the human drama to which it bears witness.
Of course, as with any such instrumental program music, it's doubtful anyone would be able to identify the plot or main themes of Czar Nicholas Is Dead when heard out of context or without the album's liner notes in hand. Nevertheless, the album is filled with captivating performances and exquisite narrative details, such as the wintry, shivering drones of "July 21: Ipatiev Returns Home" or the distant martial snares that weave through "The Firing Squad". On "Koptyaki Road, Night", Kiefer combines field recordings and solo guitar with a melancholic lyricism similar to that of Loren Connors, while "The Politburo Dreams of the Urals" is an off-balance structure of uneasy electronics and distortion. The acoustic guitar and bird-song collage "Dubinushka" shares a title-- and perhaps a brief snatch of melody-- with an anti-Czarist anthem by Rimsky-Korsakov, but is here submerged beneath the crackle of an antique 78 rpm record, giving its tranquility the appearance of a fleeting memory.
"Will each of us be increased by death?" asks Czar Nicholas in "The Czar's Last Christmas Letter: A Barn By the Urals", a poem by Norman Dubie that appears in the album's booklet. And though Kiefer is not able to supply a definitive answer to that question, on Czar Nicholas Is Dead he is able to sympathize equally with the Czar and his assassins, a group whose Bolshevik leader is remembered in the conflicted, elegiac "Yurovsky's Lament". More than anything, Kiefer's music here offers the opportunity to imagine a reflective pause sandwiched between two violent, repressive chapters of recent Russian history--a history that is too seldom patient enough to accommodate such moments of introspection.
