A handful of recordings this week from northern towns ponder the role of dancefloor melancholy. Various sonic and textual kinds of dolor merge to create an original view of sadness - within entertainment.
Four new recordings from bass and hip-hop producers touch upon the issue of standards. Worried by the growing popularity - and falling quality - of much bass music, these artists ponder a need for new values or virtues.
Russia's branch of the Red Bull Music Academy has just just chosen ten young musicians to join its "Bass Camp" in Sochi. We take a look at some of the newer names, especially among the house and juke exponents.
Three beatmakers from St. Petersburg, Omsk, and Odessa all look to their soundscapes as a way of creating an audible sense of "home." As those compositions develop, they take on a social life of their own, we're told.
Blikmuzik is a micro-label based in Brighton (UK), but with strong connections to the Lithuanian D&B/dubstep scene. So much so, in fact, that the project's raison d'être can be traced back to a Baltic land- and seascape.
Some tech-house and dubstep recordings, released simultaneously in Kiev, Murmansk, and Tallinn, all give voice to an escapist aesthetic. They speak, however, with varying degrees of confidence.
Hyperboloid Records is a discerning Moscow label dedicated to some of the best bass-, 8-bit, and "brain-music" practitioners of the present. What, therefore, appears striking is the label's use of prior decades for inspiration.
Various forms of disorder and decline are used by these artists in order to champion an escape from mercantile logic. Some favorite models of illogicality include sickness and Aubrey Beardsley
Nocow and Kontext (aka Dissident) are St Petersburg musicians who've recently recorded podcasts for Gimme5. Both men turn to a psychedelic heritage in order to counter the crude, rude experience of daily life
From the southern city of Krasnodar and the edge of Central Asia come some new compositions that play with aspects of UK dubstep. They do so in response to local social quandaries
