elc team
By Myriam Paraskevopoulou
A dark, Doric ballerina on the stage of Gagarin 205
I began listening to Michelle Gurevich systematically only in the last month. She had already existed somewhere in my ears as a feeling: through the vintage cinematic rock air of “Here’s The Part”, a music lover’s almost a priori relationship with “Goodbye My Dictator”, and the encounter of someone almost obsessively drawn to her art with “Party Girl”. What struck me, however, was that as the days went by and I discovered more of her music, I became increasingly emotionally involved.
I loved her album Ecstasy is the Shadow of Ecstasy for its smooth, vintage, dreamy character and for the paradox between its light melodies and her atmospheric voice. Of course, it is impossible to ignore “New Decadence” or the pure atmosphere of “Party Girl”.
But who is Michelle Gurevich, the artist who made me effortlessly call her by her first name after just twenty days of listening? We first came to know her under the name “Chinawoman”, a spontaneous choice when her garage band asked her for a project name. She later abandoned it after receiving criticism, as she was not Chinese and the use of the word was deemed inappropriate. Born in Canada to Russian parents, she grew up speaking Russian as her first language. She began her career as a filmmaker, but, as she has revealed in interviews, she once tried writing a song and realised that it was not only cheaper, but also much easier to achieve a good result. And so her songwriting began, from inside her bedroom.
The day of the live show, Friday 12 June, as part of Plisskën Festival, arrived, and found me standing in line outside on Liosion Street, cooling off under a few random raindrops while reapplying my lipstick in the reflection of a warehouse window, headphones on, listening to “Lovers Are Strangers”. The final notification that the live was about to begin brought me inside the packed Gagarin 205.
The first “wow” my mind shouted was for how faithfully the atmosphere of the live performance matched what I had been hearing in my headphones just five minutes earlier. “Friday Night” opened the evening, and I began to decode her. Doric to such a degree that you could believe this rare contralto voice had chosen that particular body to inhabit. As if one could not exist without the other.
Somewhere there came the second “wow” of the brain: the precision of the band and of her voice. Very rarely do indie artists with a lo-fi aesthetic sound so complete live. Next came “Vacation from Love”, and while its lyrics, at first reading, describe a kind of “self-love” holiday, I kept thinking that if dark-goth ballerinas existed, they would move only with those four or five side and forward steps that Michelle took on stage.
She paused, welcomed us, expressed her disappointment that the concert was indoors, and specifically said that there had been too much drama over just a few raindrops. She continued singing, creating in me an incredible sense of ease within the complete paradox of her lyrics and her sound. I think she handles this balance with mathematical precision.
Michelle Gurevich is a multifaceted artist, and what makes her deeply atmospheric music feel flowing rather than heavy is her mentalité. As I said before, it was like watching a dark ballerina in a Parisian cabaret, surrounded by an intensely Balkan Orthodox atmosphere where liqueur mingles with incense.
There was a softness in the way she addressed the audience. Just the right amount of humour and sarcasm, exactly as many words as needed, and a thank you to one listener, a mother of six (!) from Canada, who had travelled all the way to Greece to hear her live. For an artist with relatively modest publicity, this proves emphatically how loyal her audience is.
I felt, a little, that I belonged to her fanbase when I reacted instinctively to “Temptation”, “End of an Era”, “Love from a Distance”, “Goodbye My Dictator”, “Music Gets You Girls”. And yes, of course, to “Party Girl”.
Personally, I consider a concert successful when, on the way back, I put my headphones on again and listen on repeat to songs that had become the most immediate past of that very moment. This usually happens to me with artists who belong to the category of self-luminous constellations. That night, for me, Michelle Gurevich entered that category.
