Two new St. Petersburg recordings romanticize the homeless, aimless experience of cosmonauts. Even in Moscow, a related desire is audible, even among the most goal-driven musicians.
Two new compilation albums draw together deep-house and chillout composers from Russia, Moldova, and Kazakhstan. It slowly becomes clear that between them all lies a generational bond.
Moscow's Highway Records has announced a new sampler with contributions all the way from Izhevsk to southern Ukraine. What connects these artists? The answer lies in the history of Highway itself.
The Magnit label in Zaporozhye, Ukraine does much to celebrate tech-house as an antidote to local actuality. A few related releases from Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod also try to cancel material discomfort with sound.
New techno and tech-house recordings from Arkhangelsk, Murmansk, Kiev, and Donetsk all adopt a dizzying level of romance. The heady experiences of a dancefloor are used to imagine some faraway, even immaterial realms.
An offshoot of Moscow's Highway Records has published a four-track EP, full of deep house and nu-disco. The authors involved all speak of some "cosmic" potential within dancefloor hedonism.
Starting in the record-breaking cold of Yakutia, these four recordings imagine a life beyond ostensible (and onerous) reality. Talk of astronauts and star-bound cats soon emerges... but what principles guide those lofty realms?
Three of these recordings come from far-flung corners of the Russian landscape. That sense of isolation leads to a certain immaterialism. Only if we turn to Moscow does distance or "provinciality" fade away.
Bass tunes and hip-hop instrumentals have arrived from Vladivostok, Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kiev. Three of them imagine the emotional and mental benefits of intuitive composition. Our fourth artist is less sure.
A couple of netlabels from Kaluga and Yaroslavl frame new releases with a common philosophy. Both projects are inclined to stress the hedonism of the dancefloor, since real-world disaster seems inevitable - sooner or later.
