Gnoomes, the Russian outfit who blend a potent mix of psychedelic stargaze, kraut techno and kosmiche pop return with a brand new album, MU! their third for Rocket Recordings. Since the release of their last album Tschak! the three piece has turned into a quartet with synth player Masha Piankova joining the band. And it was the success of their tours in the UK and Europe that subconsciously created a template and tone for where the band would go next with this new album; to capture that surging drive and throbbing assault of their pulverising live shows. “We decided to make this record more live and less electronic,” Sasha, singer and guitarist from Gnoomes said. “We were thinking about how to make it sound more dynamic.” Masha’s introduction was a key one, with her replacing Sasha on synth bass whilst he moved over to second guitar to add a fuller and more impactful sonic crunch. MU! has been part recorded in the same old soviet radio station where the band recorded Tschak! part in a

Oblique Russian sound strategist Natalia Salmina’s latest forking path portfolio as Atariame, Voiceless, arose in the wake of a dissociative relocation to Moscow, where she found herself adrift amidst a manic metropolis, alone in a skyscraper staring out at trees: “It made me lose faith in my ability to communicate, in my ideas about life.” Days without speaking turned to weeks. Even in private she felt estranged from her voice, and soon ceased singing.
For solace she turned to her Waldorf Blofeld, mining its panoramic frequencies to craft a shivering suite of futurist-noir nocturnes and rhythmic noise vignettes, equal parts exorcism and manifestation, desperation and delirium. Track titles hint at the headspace – “Outside At 5 AM,” “Same Thought All Day,” “Stay Late” – mirroring the music’s mood of hoods up, headphones on, wandering empty urban tunnels under flickering streetlights. Enigmatically, Salmina slips in a sliver of spectral voice on the intro and exit songs (“Breathe Exercise” and “Deconstruction”), framing them as induction into and escape from the cryptic isolationist condition of the rest of the collection.
Mastered by P. Nikolsky, Powerhouse Moscow.
Design by Britt Brown.
TAPES STILL AVAILABLE HERE:
midheaven.com/item/voiceless-by-atariame

We at Antinote are proud to make our first French-Russian connection. Olga is from Moscow. She came to us after Dominique Dumont's show in Paris, winter 2018. We checked her music and immediately fell in love with the song 'Mojno'. Step by step we built a nice collection of tracks that now make up the 1905 LP! Very active in the electronic music scene, she’s spent the last ten years releasing music, performing, recording & DJing as well as being busy with her tech-project Playtronica (with them she's created 3 controllers that you allow to play scales on people, objects and colors). Across the "1905" LP she utilises some DIY devices such as Yamaha sampler vss-33, voice glitcher from the Russian company “Naked Boards” and organelle synth that creates this synesthetic tone in “ready when you are”. Besides dreamy pads and dancy beats Olga is ironically singing on Russian about her daily routine, in a positive way. There's no sadness and melancholy in the dark snowy days, where even the full moon or retrograde-mercury don’t even bother you ...if you are in harmony with mother nature's 5 elements.
There's a short music clip on Facebook in which the Russian artist Olga Maximova, AKA Omma, starts tapping on some blue bars of soap. It sounds really cool. She's turned the bars into "soap marimbas," wiring them up as MIDI instruments that emit a sound whenever she touches them. As part of Moscow's Playtronica collective, Maximova has made instruments out of everyday objects such as skateboards, plants and vegetables. The collective even made one instrument, called Touch Me, that's triggered by people touching and hugging each other. The soap marimba doesn't make an appearance on Maximova's first album, but her sense of tactile playfulness is all over it.
1905 arrives on the Parisian label Antinote, an outlet that specialises in releasing music from arty experimentalists. It is a short record, just 28 minutes, and it's similar in both its brevity and wistfulness to Comme Ça, the 2015 Domenique Dumont LP that remains a high point in the Antinote catalogue. The album's mood is sweet but never sickly, mostly because the majority of tracks are anchored in simple but effective club rhythms. "1905," "Ready When You Are" and "Mojno" are underpinned with crisp breakbeats, while the four-on-the-floor "Vmeste" skips along at a brisk 132 BPM. I'd bet all four tracks would get dancers going if Maximova was to perform them live.
The lyrics on 1905 have a poetic simplicity. Phrases like "noble heartbreaker," "everything is great" and "keep the promise" are intoned softly and looped across the album. On "La Qi," the words "I am feeling the emptiness" are repeated and then distorted before eventually disappearing. On the title track, Maximova says, in Russian, "We can feed the ducks and buy some milk and you will tell me what's allowed and what isn't."
This childlike sensibility gets to the heart of Maximova's approach. In a 2017 interview she spoke about a children's workshop hosted by Playtronica called Fruits Jam, in which "pineapples are your kick/snare/hi-hat, melons are the bass and cucumbers are the melody." Just reading that, you can picture the kids' smiling faces as they mess about with the fruit. It's the same simple joy in musical experimentation that's at the heart of 1905.

Long awaited new material from Lamia Vox. Titled “Alles ist Ufer. Ewig ruft das Meer” (Everything is shore. The sea calls forever) after the Gesänge poem by Gottfried Benn, the album is’nt presented merely as a musical piece but bears a deep spiritual message and a counterblast to the rational, materialistic and post-theist nihilism of current age. Inspired by early modern poetry, Hermeticism, fin-de-siècle symbolism and naturphilosophie, this new opus celebrates another vision of the world, one of higher dimensions and beyond the human sphere, a world of intoxicated and ecstatic alchemy of poetic language and ideas. An upward movement and a breakthrough from the bonds of materia to the source of life and eternity. Dionysian liberating lawlessness to oppose sterile rationalism and creativity, divine madness, metanoia as a form of ultimate salvation. Poetry flows, it is a sacred art and process and the laboratory of the Magnum Opus, a divine gift of deliberate madness.

On Room for the Moon, Kate NV follows the muse of music from one chamber of illusion to the next, harmonizing lunar lullabies with a starry compositional choreography. Conjured from unlived memories of '70s and '80s Russian and Japanese pop music and film, Room for the Moon is a 20th century fairy tale suspended in time like a moon torn from a paper sky. CD edition includes extended, and single, versions of "Sayonara" and "Tea."

Ivan Zoloto, a Karelian musician and artist based in Barcelona is releasing his new album “Pleasure Prison” on the freshly-minted label School of the Arts. Recommended if you like: dark drone and ambient, experimental electronics, raw minimalism, noise, and free-floating strings.
Just like Zoloto’s previous release, “Ghosting” on the Russian CANT label, “Pleasure Prison” is deeply immersed in psychogeography: before relocating to Spain just before the pandemic the artist has been constantly on the move. The new long-play has been composed and recorded in Russia and China but finalized in Barcelona. It’s important to note that there are no field recordings, but some of the compositions have been recorded live and later reassembled in the studio.
The title track is a 35-minute-long composition for laptop, live electronics, and an improvising violinist. It was recorded with Russian-Finnish multi-instrumentalist Sasha Kretova in Petergof, with Zoloto performing in his favorite mode: as a dub engineer, with a laptop, a mixing desk, and some Soviet and handmade effects. It fuses his two main passions together: the raw and improvised side of drone music (think Vibracathedral Orchestra) and heavily processed electronics moving at a glacial pace with distant bass... explosions.
Tracks “Problem no. 1” and “The Door Is Open” document Zoloto exploring another side of his heritage: here he’s playing jouhikko, a Karelian-Finnish bowed lyre, in a very aggressive and rude manner. He then treats it via half-broken tape recorders, conjuring some funeral noise-folk dirges.
The “Voice Message”/”Elevator Scene” suite starts off with LSS (also known as L.I.E.S.-affiliated artist 51717) whispering “pleasure prison” in a Facebook voice message and follows that with almost-techno-sounding hi-hats, ice-cold chords, and crude electronic loops performed live in Shanghai through assorted guitar amps. The result has been described by one listener as “Tim Hecker meets Hijokaidan”.
The overall mood is summarized in the following epigraph:
“I drive around the perimeter of the city like a dog marking its territory, over bridges and under bridges, the way I used to stalk the edges of my small hometown. This is mine. Nothing bad will happen here if I patrol the streets like a crazed vigilante. I drive my mother's car like it's a Panzer and the streets are my enemy, and I'm feeling bad and stupid and mean.”
⏤ Miriam Toews more

released April 7, 2019

Obkhod (transliteration of the Russian word meaning "passing by") is an action of soft slipping away, as well as an action of avoiding severe and hostile areas. Obkhod is a continuing invention, it is also a manoeuvre, when you choose to trick rather than to be tricked. It is an ongoing generation of possible ways that can be taken to get to the destination, an imaginary map that continues to unfold.
Moving further to the industrial, menacing and liminal, Lusia Kazaryan-Topchan seems to pass by different locations. We are taken to these places with her, whether they are still real or not. Lusia keeps to pursue her interest in traditional Armenian music along with intense disarming industrial and rough electronics, which creates bizarre sense of being out of any particular time, while cultural references remain quite explicit. Like some sort of dark wizard, she combines electroacoustic pieces with powerful reworked rhythms of her origin culture, passing by a popular song with catchy lyrics, and field recordings made in a place that is between real and unreal – as soon as it is marked on the journey's map. Throughout this evolving journey, Lusia avoids direct paths and prefers slipping with the indeterminate. Miscellaneous, her second full-length album refuses to be defined once and forever. It is an invention, generative, related to the factual – but resisting its certainty and completeness.

VINYL IS DELAYED. ORDERS WILL SHIP "SOMETIME IN NOV21".
Peak Oil is proud to present Invariant, the first LP in three years from Russia’s best kept electronic music secret: Hoavi.
Originally intended for pre-pandemic release, this collection of emotive and intricate homages to the slippery nature of genre has only intensified in relevancy and urgency.
From alt sci-fi dimension floor-filler “Streamline” to “Dver”, a contemplative evocation of a world in which time collapsed in on itself and liquid had embraced footwork, to the propulsive modular dub-tech evisceration of “Tessera” closing out the LP, Hoavi adroitly demonstrates why he should be considered amongst Russia’s finest cultural exports.
A gifted producer with a workaholic drive, these eight tracks are but a sample of his prodigious breath and grasp on the electronic music continuum, a clear harbinger of auspicious things to come for Hoavi.

Reborn explores yet another side of the relationship between man and nature. In a darker turn, the duo presents a more pessimistic and cautionary reflection on the environment in contrast to previous albums.
Reborn is a story about a man who forgot what brought him here. Who neglected a precious, parental, and primordial bond with nature; who unconsciously destroys the one and only home we all share, along with himself.
The irreversible damage we do to our environment will see mankind “beheaded”, whilst nature and life itself will thrive eternally.
We’d like to believe though that if we realised the value of that bond and embraced it, we’d be given a glimpse of hope in this fatalistic madness - a chance to be spared.
The cover art by MarGoat of exhausted Mother Nature ritualistically destroying and cleansing herself of humanity using human hands as her very own tools forces us to reflect on our significane. She is about to be Reborn in a new floral form.