Polina Voronova at Musica Excentrica: Luxurious

The future sound of electronic music is female!

Moscow is the centre of the young Russian Netaudio-movement. No wonder. Nexsound has been (and still is!) the best address for challenging East European / post-Russian electronic music, alongside Latvian Sutemos which has a strong leaning to Western Pop-music. But with ElectroSound, Musica Excentrica and Share My Wings lately, Moscow grew three strong and closely related Netlabels that focus on fresh Electronica and Avant-Garde music. Looking for the people that pool the whole thing, you can find Nikita Golyshev (CD-R) and especially Ilias Mikanaev, also known as Zolotu. Nikita is part of Musica Excentrica and a highly active musician (including releases at Zeromoon, Top-40, Nexsound and many more), Ilias is a graphic designer and ‘web music developer’. Being some kind of musical foster child to Nikita Golyshev, the girl Polina Voronova is one of the most interesting new artists emerging from the back-catalogue of Musica Excentrica-Netlabel.

Luxurious is Polinas’ debut album. Her music is a refreshing amalgam of synth-driven drones and ambient Electronica-studies. No glitches, no field-recordings, no Max/ MSP. Retro-futuristic sounds introduce Fire Walk With Me. The short composition shows up with some nice filter sweeps and sounds a bit like Astrowind- a great band who just released their debut EP at, well, ElectroSound. One Night and no Decisions is an aural extract of the song of the crickets that rub their wings at summer’s night, slightly enhanced with subtle sinus tones. Very much Mira Calix, another Grande Dame of electronic music (and fan of insects). Deep Outdoor at position number four is a more ‘musical’ composition, full of sparse and singular bleeps that sparkle like stars at the night sky. Calm and dense, artificial yet soothing. The next track takes Polina back to her 70s-influenced opening track. Laminating is made of bright and oscillating organ-chords, chirping filters and an overall tonality. Nice!

We’ve got two deep drones at eight and nine. Introduced with a distorted synthesizer, When and Nowhere starts as calm as Deep Outdoor and expands to huge proportions as the organ comes in. The dominant LFO-modulation proves as a hypnotic plot device, once again. Light to Celebrate afterwards works very similar though Polina switches from sinus to square. Luxurious end with Something Personal and the enigmatic Landing. The first is a surreal pieces of ambient music, including wafting planes like hilly of jelly, ominous pitch shifting and other tricks that rather makes you think of Lovecraft than Tolstoi. Last but not least, Landing is my favourite, though it’s not a typical Voronova-composition. A handful of small glockenspiel-tones (synthetic, of course), swelling synths in the back and some kind of a “rhythm”, that’s all. And there is a certain touch of glitch, finally! Comparions can be drawn to web-artists like Bluermutt, Elias Falken or the ubiquist d’incise.

End to end, Polina Voronova crafted a diversified album that manages to moderate between retro synthesizer-ambient and post-modern ambient music. She doesn’t incorporate any electro-acoustic elements, interestingly. Her beatless compositions are quite simple and usually not made of more than three or four elements- something she might have learned from her friend and exemplar Nikita Golyshev, as she states in an interview with Larry Johnson at Earlabs. I’m missing the striking brilliance you can find at Zavolokas’ debut (and later works), but I think Polina has the talent to establish herself as one of Moscows’ most promising artists.

Get the record here: Luxurious
Direct download: Get the zip-file!