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June 3, 2021
Yelena Moskovich's Playlist for Her Novel "A Door Behind A Door"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Yelena Moskovich's novel A Door Behind A Door is clever, surprising, and intense, a book I could not put down.
Booklist wrote of the book:
"A tense puzzle box of a tale... This impressionistic novel is relayed in short paragraphs of sparse, measured prose as Moskovich portrays a loosely connected group of Russian immigrants caught up in a heady mixture of desire and violence."
In her words, here is Yelena Moskovich's Book Notes music playlist for her novel A Door Behind A Door:
1. “Как Не Быть Молоком” (How To Not Be Milk) by Synecdoche Montauk
A sort of genderless Dadaist Russian Orthodox chant that could very well breeze through the streets of this novel, invisible to most ears except—those who hear it, can hear nothing else. “You will go to China / And I, to an Indian prison / But I’m a lucky man / Cause I will find you in the flames / The days count upon them…” The singer’s ethereal voice tickles like butterfly wings, then settles and sizzles quietly of lust and vengeance. “Rejoice, bitches, for the joy is stolen / On a noisy and festive street…. I will betray you.”
2. “hell boy” by Lil Peep
Lil Peep is one of the patron saints of this novel. The Pennsylvania throwaway genius of SoundCloud rap and member of the Gothboiclique is a gravel-tongued poet of toxic sorrow over hypnotic low-fi trap beats veering into emo, trance, punk, and hip hop. Spirit child of Rimbaud et Cobain, who died way too young, way too sad, way too misloved.
3. “GIOVANNA HARDCORE” by MYSS KETA
This avant-garde Italian singer and performance artist inhabits Joan of Arc as her alter-ego, alias “Giovanna Hardcore”, Godless and divine punk of her own mythology, ripping through King Arthur’s narrative amongst other misogynist territories with a fury-festive gait. My favorite moment of transcendence is about halfway through the techno-pop beats and sporadic horse sounds, she starts shouting “What the fuck – fuck – what the fuck – FUCK” like a pissed-off maiden in the prairie ready to destroy and recreate the entire world.
4. “Romeo and Juliet’s Love Theme” by Nino Rota
The theme from the 1968 adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet by Franco Zeffirelli is over-ripe with tragic youth and jestering Fate. It’s creepy and romantic and full of grief. “What is a youth? Impetuous fire. What is a maid? Ice and desire.” There is a Midwestern angst in the languorous folk melody, that feeling of being so utterly no-where and canonized by love all at once.
5. “angel rock” by Dua Saleh
Sudanese-origin, Minneapolis based queer poet and musician conjures songs like proverbial spells, human truths that come up for air and reveal themselves in their dirt and purity with an unhinged integrity. This inner world come-to-life is a lace-work of guitar strums and gusts of strings and missteps of grace and despair. Their voice starts out as Mickey Mouse phantomatic, then unexpectedly develops into a taut, gender-freed testimony to the winds. “Uncle Ruckus got addicted to the payroll soon / We'll get elixir from the pharaoh / Cupid shuffles to that rhythm of his arrow / Couldn't have me if he wanted, why he stare, huh?”
6. “Лабиринт” (Labyrinth) by FACE
This catchy Russian hip hop hit has an immaculate political bite. Dance to the music and punch a metaphorical wall of the prison you realize you also miraculously escaped: “My father left when I was only five months old / I wanted to hang myself when I turned ten / And my mother lost her mind when I was fourteen /Almost all my friends are in jail / How was it that I made it out?”
This year, the rapper behind FACE, Ivan Dryomin’s song became the unofficial anthem of the Russian winter protests, the tagline: “Being against power doesn’t mean being against your motherland.” But it’s above all the earnest deliverance of compassion and anger, the lucidity upon the contradiction of being no longer where you were both mothered and wounded – that territory of origins, where life was given but livelihood denied.
7. “Song to the Siren by This Mortal Coil
The dream that has been dreamed so many times, it no longer needs the dreamer. This type of dream is a character of its own in the novel. It pierces our waking in its perfect soundscape body. It sings and sings and sings and sings. And yet, there is no singer.
8. “Psychobitch” by Easter
This is Tanya’s song. I think it’s the song that she sings to the bestie she is in love with, Sveta. This may be their way of loving each other. This may be the only way of loving they’ve known. This is their love song: “Psychobitch you destroyed my life, you destroyed my life and I want you to die. I want you to die and to die in pain, I never want to see your psycho face again.”
9. “Sous l’eau” (Under water) by Keren Ann
This is water lapping at the shore where Crazy Mama (Oxana) lost her son. This is the faucet running in Nikolai’s childhood. This is the tear that Olga’s brother cries when he loses sight in one of his eyes. These are the waves beneath the Russian poet Lermontov’s poem “Parus” about a lone sailboat that chooses to go into the dangerous storm instead of staying in the safe waters. “C’est beau sous l’eau…” It’s beautiful beneath the water.
10. “Killin’ on Demand” by Freddie Dredd
“All I see is demons creeping in this fucking palace,” the geek ninja rap spits. “Medieval shit, cause so much of evil shit.” There a stunted, haywire violence that throws continual tantrums throughout the novel, and this song is like a manifestation of Brendan’s tantrum. But also, Dima’s, if he would have lived.
11. “cherubim” by serpentwithfeet
A ballad of erotic loyalty. A stomping sort of procession. A gladiator valentine. They repeat with unrepenting care, “I get to devote my life to him / I get to sing like the cherubim”. Serpentwithfeet’s mesmeric experimental serenades are forms of translucent queer loving and this one evokes the near-mythic sense of brotherhood, partnership, and companionship that grows between Moshe and Rémy in the novel.
Yelena Moskovich was born in 1984 in Ukraine (former USSR) and emigrated to the US with her family in 1991. After graduating with a degree in playwriting from Emerson College, Boston, she moved to Paris to study at the Lecoq School of Physical Theatre, and later for a Masters degree in Art, Philosophy and Aesthetics from Universite Paris 8. Her plays have been produced in the US, Vancouver, Paris, and Stockholm. She lives in Paris.
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