"Kubikmaggi: Using and Abusing the Traditions of St. Petersburg Kubikmaggi continue to offer idiotic, grotesque, and "high-pressure" investigations of reality’s baroque multiplicity. It’s a process that involves much training, constant hard work, and little rest. In addition, these efforts — as noted — are very much part and parcel of the local literary, if not psychological landscape. It may not seem a very happy realm in which to reside, but given the awful shallowness of the moneyed environment that Dostoevskii’s Lev Myshkin discovered in the 19th century, maybe mental instability doesn’t look so bad."

David MacFadyen: What plans do you all have this summer? Are there any fixed projects you’re working on, or is everybody taking a break?
Kubikmaggi: Each year we plan heading off to some of the better festivals, but it has never worked out that way. Unfortunately, we don’t have the right kind of connections yet, and information or demo recordings distributed by email never lead to anything. It could be because we only know of a few festivals that’d be willing to host our kind of music. We’ve been looking for a manger for quite some time, the kind of person who could help us in this area."

Their press releases are vague, their place in the musical world is strange, since promotion requires exactly defined musical style. With reluctance they are accepted in jazz clubs, and with suspicion they are met at rock clubs. You could call it, for example, a Lobachevskiy kind of pop music — when figuratively spontaneous meets thoroughly rehearsed, leaving the listener to guess which one is what..."

— Are the 19th century’s vanguard and modernism being continued nowadays?
— The vanguard didn’t begin in the 19th century. Roughly speaking, this is a word that’s been always used, is in use now, and will always be. The vanguard and the modernism have always been close to us; we are trying to keep to them.
— Ksenia, what do you prefer: the classics or your own works? Do you like your music to become classics sometime afterward?
— If I prefer the classics, why compose? (laughs). The classics is some auditory relief for me, it gives me new horizons in my creative work. In about 50 — 70 years, my own morks, maybe, will become the classics either, yet I don’t have such a goal.
— When play live, you often improvise. Is it on purpose that you do not play solid compositions?
— This is just one of few music methods. The contemporary music can’t exist without improvising — as well as a human being doesn’t. We are to think something up all the time. When the music is being created right here and right now — that’s why improvisation is the summit of music: it is art in time. I am not a poet, I am a musician. Let somebody put texts down, I will improvise."

Kubikmaggi play something compound-complex which they prefer to call "jazz punk". The core is the voice and fluttering piano, enriched by sophisticated bass, guitar and drums for better motion. The burden of higher musical education carried by the band members gives this construction inescapable unintelligibility that could have buried the whole idea under a soulless avant-garde gravestone. Really, that happens a number of times — complication for the sake of complication, but in the best things ("Vzdoh", "Ja suzhu", "Deva") Fedorova plays and sings like some talk in sleep — freely, fancily, brokenly. The songs work as a mechanism of diving into a state of slumber, chamber and intimate, like any slumber should be."

"Kubikmaggi may be the most nervous Russian band. Their performing on Jazz Koktebel Festival last autumn wrapped up in a veil of decadent reflections brought a cold note, in all senses, into the content of the set-list and turned out to be a break-through of the festival."