Self-exiled Russian artist and the voice behind duo Iamthemorning, Marjana Semkina has taken a different approach on her second solo album, Sirin. Her trademark melancholy lyrics are now ignited by anger over the political situation in her birth country, in what the singer-songwriter describes as a “unified art project.” She tells Prog about the hope, heartbreak and personal cheerleading team that made the exciting release possible.
Marjana Semkina’s second solo album, Sirin, is full of songs of ornate beauty that belie their bleak subject matter. The Russian singer has always had a predilection for the darkest of fairy tales – but, crucially in this real-life story, the world has become a perilous, nightmarish place since she released her solo debut, Sleepwalking, in February 2020.
Semkina left St Petersburg in the middle of lockdown that year to take up residence on the Sussex coast, having attained a tier-one ‘exceptional talent’ visa. Then, as was the case for millions of others, her world was turned upside down when the country she grew up in invaded Ukraine in February 2022. As Pericles once said: “Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you.”
“For me, music was always a means of escaping reality,” she says, “because I didn’t particularly like reality. I always thought that when art becomes political, it defeats the purpose. At some point, there’s a line where you can’t really avoid it any longer; and when Russia invaded Ukraine, that’s when I was like, ‘Okay, this is it.’ As a Russian with a conscience, I have a platform and I’m in a safe country. I’m not going to get arrested for saying things that I’m not supposed to say.”
Sirin is named after a female-headed bird from Slavic mythology, who lures men to their deaths with her beautiful singing, then weeps for their lost souls. The symbolism is strongly connected to the main theme of the record – the war itself – though, as Iamthemorning fans will know already, death is never too far from Semkina’s mind. Why does she think about the final exit so much?
“I think it’s something we Russians are born with,” she posits, with a sigh of resignation. “Russia has this enormously rich cultural heritage, but most works of art are exceptionally melancholic, and all of them have something to do with death or madness: Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, Prokofiev, Shostakovich... There’s a lot of grim stuff that has happened over the centuries in Russia. That very special type of misery just seems to be embedded in our DNA.”
The powerful opening track, We Are The Ocean, is a defiant riposte; its lyrics include the line: ‘Louder/Our voices will ring through the walls of this prison.’ Incarceration would be almost a certainty should Semkina return home any time soon, with sentences of 13 years regularly meted out for criticism of the state. “I did a lot of things that would get me arrested there,” she concurs.
We Are The Ocean was inspired by friends who went out into the streets in the first weeks of the war, and ended up in prison for protesting peacefully. “They even arrested a girl who was standing in a suit with just a blank piece of paper,” she says, shaking her head. “And she was making the point that even doing that would be considered worthy of sending someone to jail.”
While Semkina feels she’s now in a safe location, Gleb Kolyadin, her musical partner in Iamthemorning, had a scare in January when he and his Russian-Belarusian bandmates in the anti-war, anti-Putin group Bi-2 were held in a Bangkok detention centre for allegedly not having a permit to play in Thailand. Fears grew that the band would be deported back to Russia.
Semkina set up a petition at Change.org, which was quickly signed by more than 3,500 people. The international fuss it created helped secure safe passage for Kolyadin and his band, with all seven members deported to Israel. Kolyadin is now back in the UK – although Iamthemorning fans will have to wait for their sixth album, as the pair are both busy with their respective projects.
I do like a juxtaposition and I think contrasts work really well in art. If there’s darkness, the light will shine brighter
“He just got a piano,” Semkina says. “So he’s very happy working on an album. He’s doing fine. I think he can make a home here, even though he never really chose to come here.”
A sense of displacement pervades Sirin; even songs that sound hopeful, like The Storm, are anything but. “I do like a juxtaposition and I think contrasts work really well in art,” says Semkina. “If there’s darkness, the light will shine brighter.” It’s a songwriting technique she picked up from a master. “Steven Wilson writes in a similar manner in some of his songs, like Drown With Me, which is an exceptionally happy-sounding song about somebody who’s drowning. I think I inherited that from him a little bit because I’ve been listening to Porcupine Tree for a very long time.”
She affirms: “There is hope on the record. But The Storm is about my friends in Ukraine. Because of the Russian bombing, they were left without electricity and water for weeks. I have a lot of friends there and I was watching their stories and talking to them while all this was happening. The Storm is an appeal for the war to end.”
Amid the cataclysmic negatives there are tiny cracks of light. For Semkina personally, her Kickstarter campaign for Sirin couldn’t have gone better, raising nearly £50,000 in just over 24 hours. “I opened my Patreon in 2019, and it has become this incredible community of people that aren’t just supporting me financially – they’re also hyping me up. It’s my personal cheerleading team!”
The fans have also encouraged her to fulfil some of her wilder dreams when it comes to presentation. With help from Dunk!pressing she’s created a unique and limited run of vinyl containing gold leaf, presented in a sleeve stamped with gold foil; and there’s also a deluxe gold-stamped book version of the CD album. The visual effect of both is redolent of a Gustav Klimt painting – it glitters on the outside while at its core beats a gothic heart.
The eagle-eyed will notice that Semkina has also returned the ‘j’ back in her Christian name, after a brief flirtation with the letter ‘i’ (ie Mariana, the name her passport bears). “That was a blip,” she explains. Her label at the time, Kscope, thought it would be easier to sell the artist without any tricky silent letters in her name. “Everybody knows me as Marjana with a ‘j’, and people were complaining that they couldn’t find my music anywhere. So, when I left the label and decided to release this on my own, it felt appropriate to just kind of revert back.
I’m growing as an artist, which is a normal thing if you work hard… I definitely knew what I was doing a bit more
“They didn’t really put pressure on me. They just said they thought it would be better, and I thought, ‘Well, that’s their profession, they know better.’ But yeah, unfortunately, they don’t know better.”
If Semkina has taken back control (she admits managing herself can be hard), it’s certainly working for her so far. She’s overseen the execution of a confident and coherent record that features two dazzling duets – Anything But Sleep with Jim Grey from Caligula’s Horse, and Death And The Maiden with Mick Moss of Antimatter. Back in 2022, she expressed a surprising diffidence about her first solo outing; but there are no sophomore blues with Sirin, a work crafted from a very specific vision that holds together musically and aesthetically.
“Sleepwalking wasn’t really meant to be an album,” she says. “It happens often; it’s from 20 years of accumulated material that you wrote and you didn’t know why you were writing it. At some point I just decided to compile all of the songs and put them together – I didn’t ultimately know if it would work. It was the first thing that I did under my own name, which is very different to working with a band, where you share responsibility over the outcome. A band situation makes it less stressful.”
She says her “confidence levels weren’t great” at the time either. Since then, her Patreon success, the ‘exceptional talent’ stamp on her passport, and the Prog awards that helped her to obtain that coveted Arts Council classification have all done wonders for her confidence as an artist. Where Sleepwalking was an album she more or less (ahem) sleepwalked into, Sirin was written and conceived as “this unified thing.” She adds: “I’m happy to say that I’m growing as an artist, which is a normal thing if you work hard. With Sirin, I definitely knew what I was doing a bit more.”
Perhaps the most unifying theme on this album is heartbreak in one form or another. The war, of course; but also from a personal perspective. Lyrics to songs such as Angel Street, Gone and Pygmalion disclose some of the awful treatment she encountered in a relationship that left her with a wounded heart. Indeed, Prog notices a YouTube comment under the video for the stirring latter composition where she writes: “I dedicate this video to my ex,” followed by an ironic winking emoji.
“It was a joke to myself, I suppose,” she laughs. “He was a really bad person. And things went very badly. But essentially the message of the video to Pygmalion is people who try to bury others will instead dig holes for themselves.” She puts it another way: “Don’t be a dick.”
I know a lot of musicians who are now trying to hide the fact that they’re Russian. I think it’s very, very cowardly to do that
Where her previous albums were about escapism, there’s an inescapable truth at the centre of Sirin that Semkina has come to terms with: you can run, but you can’t hide from who you are, or where you come from. “I was never a big fan of Russia,” she says, “and I’m not a very proud Russian. But where we grow up defines us; in a way it can define you as someone who grew up to be the person that you are in spite of where you grew up. And I think it’s very important to own it.
“I know a lot of musicians who are now trying to hide the fact that they’re Russian. I think it’s very, very cowardly to do that. I’ll not magically turn into a British person even when I get citizenship and a blue passport next year.
”So Sirin is open about the fact: I’m Russian, deal with it. Because it’s important to show the world that we are against what is happening. It’s important for us to do our duty and protest as much as we can.”