Archives are strange places. We often imagine them as warehouses of certainty, carefully preserving the past against the erosion of time. Yet every archive also records an absence. It preserves voices whose owners are gone, gestures detached from the hands that made them, music that once belonged to living communities but now survives as an unanswered question. "Malencyk / Lami", released by the Minsk-based interdisciplinary collective Shatkavalka, understands this paradox better than most contemporary projects dealing with historical material. It is not an act of restoration. It is an act of listening.

The double LP unfolds almost like two mirrors facing one another across decades. The first record presents field recordings of Stanislau Malencyk (1928-2007), captured in the late 1990s by ethnographer Mykola Kozienka. The second belongs to Italian sound artist Giovanni Lami, who does not accompany, remix or modernize these recordings. Instead, he responds to them from a respectful distance, acknowledging that some conversations can only happen across time.

Malencyk himself is an extraordinary figure, precisely because history nearly overlooked him. Born in what was then Polish territory before becoming part of Belarus, he never received formal musical training, nor did he possess expensive instruments. He simply played. Self-built violins, harmonicas, melodies learned by ear, endless weddings, village celebrations, departures, reunions. Music was not performance in the modern sense but a social necessity, woven into everyday life with the same naturalness as baking bread or harvesting fields.

Listening to these archival performances today requires a certain adjustment of expectations. Their value does not lie in technical perfection. Quite the opposite. The recordings are rough, immediate and occasionally fragile, carrying all the imperfections of field documentation. Yet those imperfections become evidence of proximity. One hears not simply melodies but rooms, distances, movement, voices, the subtle friction between musician and environment. These are not museum artefacts frozen behind glass. They still breathe.

The opening succession of polkas, waltzes, mazurkas and tangos reveals something fascinating about rural musical life in twentieth-century Eastern Europe. Tradition was never as pure as later romantic myths suggested. Belarusian folk dances coexist naturally with echoes of Central European ballroom traditions, popular interwar repertoire and local improvisation. Malencyk absorbs everything without anxiety over stylistic boundaries. Identity here is porous rather than protected.

There is also immense joy in these performances. Even when recorded decades after the social world that originally nourished them had begun disappearing, they retain an instinctive vitality. One imagines village floors vibrating beneath dancing feet, conversations continuing around the music, children running between adults. The recordings preserve not only songs but traces of communal existence itself.

And then Giovanni Lami enters.

Fortunately, he does not attempt the fashionable gesture of "updating" folk music through electronic accompaniment. That route has produced enough disappointing albums to fill several digital graveyards. Instead, Lami begins from a far subtler premise: if the community surrounding Malencyk no longer exists, perhaps what remains is not the melody itself but its resonance.

Working with MIDI transcriptions, modular synthesis, tape manipulation, live sampling and electroacoustic processing, Lami stretches the original material until recognition becomes secondary to memory. The resulting pieces feel like distant weather systems generated by forgotten dances. Rhythms dissolve into elongated textures, harmonic traces flicker beneath layers of analogue instability, while silence occupies as important a role as sound.

There is something profoundly moving about this refusal to imitate. Lesser artists might have sprinkled folk samples over ambient drones and congratulated themselves on building bridges between tradition and modernity. Lami instead accepts that some distances cannot be erased. His work inhabits that distance rather than pretending it never existed.

The three extended compositions on Side C gradually establish an entirely different relationship with listening. "Zanemakurtza", "Alaska Sundryakea" and "Belash Zankav" seem to emerge from the archival recordings like shapes appearing through fog. They never quite settle into familiar structures, constantly oscillating between presence and disappearance. They resemble memories recalled by someone who never actually lived them.

Side D pushes even further inward. Here, electronics become less technological than geological, layers slowly accumulating until individual gestures lose their identity inside larger sonic landscapes. Lami has often explored the physicality of sound in previous works, drawing from field recording, electroacoustic composition and environmental listening. That experience serves him exceptionally well here. His interventions never overshadow Malencyk because they were never intended to.

The project's visual dimension deserves mention as well. Volha Savic's archival collages avoid nostalgic illustration, instead assembling fragments that behave much like the music itself: incomplete, displaced, suggestive rather than explanatory. Together with the accompanying essays and photographs, the release becomes less an album than a carefully curated ethnographic object.

Perhaps the most remarkable achievement of "Malencyk / Lami" is its refusal to romanticize loss. Rural Belarus appears neither as an idyllic paradise nor as an irretrievable tragedy. Communities disappear. Languages evolve. Rituals migrate. Memory fragments. None of this can be reversed. Yet something survives, not intact but transformed.

Listening to these two records consecutively produces an almost physical sensation of temporal displacement. The first asks us to imagine a world. The second asks whether imagination itself might become a legitimate form of preservation.

In an era obsessed with immediate access, instant context and algorithmic certainty, this project insists upon slower forms of understanding. It reminds us that heritage is not merely something to conserve, but something we continually renegotiate through listening. Every generation hears the past differently, because every present asks different questions.

"Malencyk / Lami" offers no comforting answers. Instead, it creates an extraordinary meeting place where a self-taught village musician from twentieth-century Belarus and an experimental Italian sound artist quietly discover they have been speaking compatible languages all along. Not identical languages, certainly. But perhaps that is precisely why the conversation feels so alive.