Andrey Kiritchenko: "Tiny Digital Melodies and Noise."

Andrey Kiritchenko is a well-respected, constantly impressive instrumentalist from the Ukrainian city of Kharkov. Writing of his work is always something of a challenge, since the range of available recordings is so broad - and the quality so consistent. We turned therefore to the musician himself, and asked if he might suggest a starting point from which to showcase his extensive discography. He was kind enough to give us the first three tracks in this post as a example of new labors.

Kritichenko was born in his hometown 34 years ago; his first steps towards a musical career began whilst still a teenager. Those early efforts were within the framework of contemporary rock, but - by his own admission - he has been wholly dedicated to "experimental electronic and electro-acoustic" fields for the last ten years, if not longer. In slightly more specific terms, he now defines the sweep of his creative purview as covering the distance "from indie-pop to free-improvisation, from melodic electro-acoustic compositions to experimental techno and dub."

These multifaceted styles find expression at a number of festivals and web-based venues around the nation, most importantly via the Nexsound label that currently publishes a substantial part of his catalog. Side-projects of importance include Critikal and Sinew, both used as sandboxes or means of investigating new ideas, prior to their (fixed) appearance on hard media at Nexsound.

Nexsound operates on the same hushed scale as most of Kiritchenko's output. The label prefers to categorize its endeavors, irrespective of the artist under consideration, as "environmental music" or "indocile ambient." The company's representatives say, en route to an explanation of that peculiar adjective: "The music of Nexsound envelops you. Listening to it produces the sensation of being immersed in a very special atmosphere. This are recordings intended for private listening, rather than for any public context."

The music of Nexsound envelops you. Listening to it produces the sensation of being immersed in a very special atmosphere. This are recordings intended for private listening, rather than for any public context.

Slowly, this concept of poorly behaved or "indocile ambient" sound starts to dovetail with the label's brief, programmatic statement. We can show that overlap through a quick consideration of the term "ambient" per se. Ambient works are designed to evoke sounds around or beyond standard notions of musical composition; put differently, they do not delineate between the supposed clarity of "superior" studio recordings and the messy actuality of life around a soundproofed location. They place music back amid the quotidian squeaks, blips, and scratches that fill our hearing whenever we encounter music.

Any ambient work, therefore, that claims - as here - to be "indocile" or slightly unmanageable would suggest that it emphasizes those external noises, more than it tries to capture or foreground anything indoors. It gives greater weight to the "misbehaved," unpredictable aspects of our shared soundscape, and therefore exists more in order to record sounds than to create them.

Ambient works of this description find and foreground the sounds made by our environment. They are then offered to an audience, whose members - in retrospect - peruse those noises in search of any repetitive, musical qualities.

In further support of that concept, we can offer some of the online lists, created by Kiritchenko, in which he lists his "band members." Following the names of a few colleagues and the instruments they use (as if the musical tools themselves were workmates), Kiritchenko then moves his points of reference away from studios... and out towards the streets, fields, and forests of surrounding territories. The last reference point in his catalog of band members even credits the environment itself, once again as a place where "music" is captured, rather than created.

Put differently, over and above his fellow artists, Kiritchenko lists an "acoustic guitar, piano, toys, bandura, autoharp, Tibetan bowls, hi-hats, percussion, mouth-harmonica, didgeridoo, contact microphone on the human body and other surfaces, a Pearl snare drum, and [last, but not least] field recordings."

The longer the list, the further we find ourselves from the canon - and its home address. Orderly, codified forms of musical expression give way to the indocile crunch and crackle of life itself. This is the context into which we're invited to "immerse" ourselves, all in the name of a better "private listening" experience. Taking this argumentation to its logical extreme, the more we prejudice field recordings, the greater one's opportunity for private, subjective benefit. The smaller our presence amid those same fields, be they literal or sonic, the greater our philosophical gain.

It's for this very reason, no doubt, that some of Kiritchenko's most beautiful music has been made together with the members of "ethnotronic" ensemble Ojra. The last two tracks in this post come from a recent collaborative effort involving both Ojra and Kiritchenko, called "A Tangle Of Mokohsha." Here the musicians, paying audible tribute to field recordings in the literal sense, take folk works, gathered on their own ethnographic expeditions, and "infuse" them with Kiritchenko's instrumental wizardry.

Meanwhile that same instrumentalist goes on expeditions of his own, designed - so to speak - in order to make his craft maximally mobile.

The members of Ojra - shown below - are Halyna Breslavets (vocals), Natalka Dudynska (violin), Petro Yuha (hulusi, dvoyanka, guitar), and Yurko Yefremov (bass, dulcimer, drymba [Jew's harp], kalimba, buhay, bayan). Their various instruments, from places as disparate as Bulgaria and China, are used to embody the same outlook that's implied in descriptions of Kiritchenko's music.

There is a clear centrifugal tendency in these efforts: a combination of inclusiveness (i.e., the involvement of ambient sound) and the resulting desire to erase any orderly specificity of national traditions, too. Music becomes a mere open "field," in which the proud isolation of any one heritage - or the chauvinistic advocacy thereof - is happily reduced, if not removed.

And indeed the promotional materials used for Ojra's collaborations with Andrey Kiritchenko proclaim their ability, using exactly "ambient, electronic, and field recordings, to guide listeners' attention, in order to 'melt them down' within the music." Metaphors of dissolution, moving from solid to fluid, increasingly "indocile" forms, are again brought to the foreground.

The love of Ojra for the folk traditions of Eastern Ukraine supports those metaphors perfectly; their enthusiasm emerges from a rustic realm in which the borders between safe, closeted existence and endless fields are erased. There is no privacy as such, since individuality is realized within and as the environment: these are the songs and sounds of human nature, in all possible senses. The noises made by humans in nature, and - perhaps more importantly - vice versa.

Kiritchenko's discography is extensive, and now includes well over 40 albums. Such a large catalog from a young musician might lead to suspicions of quantity overwhelming quality. Any such worries, however, would be unfounded. Kiritchenko continues to invite claims that he may be one of the most appealing electronic musicians in Eastern Europe. Chutzpah resulting from critical acclaim, though, is always undercut by the kind of centrifugal, increasingly modest worldview that we're sketching here.

That same outlook plots a musical and philosophical trajectory nicely defined in one description of Kiritchenko's catalog as "acoustic and digital aesthetics, tiny melodies, and noise." In other words, we begin with canonized, traditional instruments in a studio setting, which are then manipulated with digital tools, such that tiny, self-deprecating harmonies emerge. Those same harmonies are the result of life's "noise" being allowed into the music - as disorderly chatter. This passage, from acoustic performance to the noise of  the environment is extremely close to the rationale or raison d'etre behind folk music.

We saw above that Kiritchenko often uses contact microphones in his work, in other words small amplifiers that allow us to hear the vibrations running through solid objects, such as the human body. Contacts mics make audible the ways in which the presumed solidity of our bodies is in fact deceptive: we are constantly run through by all manner of sonic processes, both those that emanate within us and those that pass through our frames. We are, in other words, already "immersed" and "dissolved" in our social contexts. Due, sadly, to closeted urban existence, we have forgotten such linkages and live instead in haughty solitude.

With tools like contact microphones (widening our spatial notions of selfhood) and the grand historical scale of Ojra's folk songs, Kiritchenko continues to make exquisite music, based on high-end digital aesthetics and the antique benefits of tiny melodies amid rustic noise. Life in rural Ukraine, amid lofty blooms and shaggy shrubbery, appears to be of emotional benefit. Let this image be a calling card for some of the country's most enchanting - and quietest! - music today.