Various electronic recordings this week from Kiev, Ulan-Ude, Ekaterinburg, and Gomel speak less of free creation than of the search for verity. Local experience, however, does not always help.
A range of new industrial drone and harsh noise recordings from Riga, Moscow, Orel, and Togliatti are used in order to voice some ineffable aspects of modernity. Most of those truths are very disconcerting.
The Belarusian techno collective "Force Carriers" has published a new compilation album. Many of the performers involved look back with fondness to the stargazing romance of socialist industry.
Various freedoms, both social and emotional, are pondered in some new electronic recordings from Russia. As the pressures upon liberty increase, one of the artists coins the generic tag "drowntempo."
The phenomenon of vaporwave has been gathering critical traction in the US. In a Russian context, though, the same sounds recall a very different social reality.
A number of electronic projects around Russia announce their demise this week. They attribute that vanishing act to the laws of nature or "entropy," even, in ways that slowly inform an entire worldview.
Five performers from Russia and Ukraine consider the link between one's physical surroundings and notions of risk. A home environment determines one's view of whatever lies outside.
Teapression Waves is a young and promising electronic label, using a host of generic tags to define its gloomy output. Those same categorizations, however, are not employed in standard western ways.
Echochorus, a one-man project from Riga, has published a new soundtrack to the 1924 silent feature, "Aelita." Some core concerns from that recording emerge in other locations, far from the Baltic Sea.
The 'Force Carriers' collective in Minsk has produced another compilation of minimal techno. From within a famously industrial style comes talk of lyricism, mysticism, and other "cosmic" potentials.
