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I/Dex is the pseudonym of Vitaliy Harmash, a remarkable musician from the Belarusian town of Novopolotsk. Relatively small though that location may be, with perhaps 100,000 residents today, it has already provided us with another artist, namely DJ Letkoben, about whom we wrote in June 2009. As we noted at that time, the history of Novopolotsk is neither long not happy. It speaks directly of some dramatic failings in the "development" of twentieth-century Europe.
Formed only the late 1950s, the town would very quickly encounter some awful troubles: “When the new factories were being built, they were placed far enough away from [the bigger, nearby city of] Polatsk to provide protection from their radiation and dangerous gases. However, the construction of workers’ residential buildings close to the factories was approved. With them came a hospital, a fire station, and a school. A few more buildings were built and the city of Novopolotsk was born. Its population grew over the years, even though it was located dangerously close to those factories, with all their ecological problems. ”
Growing up amid these unnerving processes, Harmash began playing music at a very young age. Some of his first memories involve dabbling with his father's guitar or "twiddling the knobs on some DIY effect-boxes." By the early 1990s he was starting to commit these random outings to tape, working initially with synthesizers, drum machines, field recordings, and radio noises. Only recently has all this heavy industry moved to the more portable confines of a laptop.
In developing his creative work further, Harmash claims to be influenced by a wide range of phenomena, very few of which are connected to canonical forms of music. He has special praise and gratitude for "radio noise, vinyl crackles, abandoned places, the Baltic Sea, [the genre of ] cyberpunk, oval[s], sine waves, glitches, and Soviet synths." That last category is interesting; somewhere in the music of the past there lies a potential that has yet to be fully expressed. Harmash likens it, implicitly, to the sweep of the Baltic Sea and the pleasingly predictable (or natural) oscillations of a sine wave.
Certain patterns, in other words, are just meant to be be... yet they have not been fully expressed.
When Harmash, in the same series of observations, likens his music to "fresh spring air," we again sense the kind of sonic or social expanses he is trying to create with his minimal tunes. Not long ago, Denver's Hybrid Magazine wittily referred to I/Dex as "the least amount of noise you can make and legally call it music." These ideal sonic spheres, continuing (or continuing to dream) where the sad history of Novopolotsk stops, are broad, swept by the "fresh air," and evidently not heavily populated.
Nature is suggesting better models for emulation than human "industry."
We can extend that idea by looking at the artwork for I/Dex's most recent recording, the beautifully understated "Layers," shown at the top of this post. We see a combination of urban- and open landscapes; all heavy industry and dense population is pushed into the background. Much closer to us, seen through a deep green filter, are a young tree and open field. Across that verdant space, a draftsman's pen scribes a line. Atop the same drawing instrument, instead of an eraser, we see a small antenna. "Information" is taken from a natural venue and turned into audible signals: the sounds of fresh spring air or the open sea.
These are the naturally harmonious spheres to which places like Novopolotsk once aspired, but which they would never reach. The blue skies of social dreaming never quite opened above the city's concrete rooftops.
Harmash looks for these ideal, elusive sounds on a regular basis. Occasionally they are tantalizingly close: "Music is all around us. Sometimes I go out onto the street at night to listen to it. It’s different all the time, like a picture. But if you mean music captured on digital media, well, that's not always something you could call 'real music.'" When defining what "real" music might be, he has difficulty: "That's hard to answer at once. Maybe I'd need to go into a shop and ask what’s popular today; perhaps I'd need to buy some discs and listen to them. To be honest, though, I don't want to harp on about this eternal issue of 'real' vs. 'popular' music."
Rather than the canonical or artistic limits of popular culture, Harmash speaks again in favor of open, empty fields. Above, as we heard, he even praised the appeal of "abandoned" places, the kind of locations where human endeavor has admitted its failures and walked away. The ground is thus cleared for a second attempt.
This love of openness, in various senses, is given another sonic dimension: "I’m not sure that it’s possible to hear music properly using multimedia speakers or headphones. There are even lots of people who listen to music through telephone headsets nowadays!"
I’m not sure that it’s possible to hear music properly using multimedia speakers or headphones. There are even lots of people who listen to music through telephone headsets nowadays!
Finding the right atmosphere in Harmash's hometown is a tall order. If he cannot hear what he wants, with or without headphones at the moment, where would he rather be? "Many people dream of living in a major city. I wouldn't want that; there's too much fuss... Quite often I feel like moving somewhere totally different. I think that Iceland or Norway would be the best options for me."
Writing of the new release, "Layers," the British webzine Milk Factory had the following to say. "Spanning just over fifty minutes, Layers, Harmash’s second album, is a particularly exquisite collection of brittle electronica, built around nine pieces woven into each other to form a perfectly coherent whole. Harmash works with a vast array of clicks, micro-beats and granular sounds which he assembles into fairly minimal, yet somewhat lush-sounding pieces, relying on very little more than molecular electronics..."
"If Harmash’s day-to-day industrial surroundings have filtered through his work, it is perhaps more with the use of machines itself than in the resulting music he creates. Indeed, despite the panoply of electronics and effects on display, the compositions have a deeply pastoral feel to them, which stems both from Harmash’s exceptionally subtle melodies, and from the glistening aspect of his finely detailed soundscapes, while the natural flow of the record is greatly enhanced by the constant sonic progression from one end of the record to the other..."
That progression leads us full circle, back to our initial suggestion that I/Dex is writing music to wipe clean the slate of Belarusian "progress." It tries to evoke the kind of empty, natural, and promising vistas that once stood around his hometown - before that town was even built. In the words of one of his earlier promo-texts from a couple of years ago, I/Dex "creates the most pleasing audio/living environment as you walk down city streets, ride a bus, or do some chores. This music is perfect both for home and work. I/Dex puts rose-colored spectacles on you. Wearing those spectacles, you will begin to see the world around you as more beautiful - and romantic, too."
Somewhere beyond the smoke of Novopolotsk is a better, ecologically efficient alternative to (failed) society. I/Dex offers music for the short ride across the Belarusian landscape needed to get there.
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