Nexsound – experimental, ambient, noise, improv record label

Review

Vital

Andrey Kiritchenko – Misterrious

Kiritchenko returns here to Spekk, following ‘True Delusion’ (see Vital Weekly 476), although of course Kiritchenko has released various other releases in the meantime. He set himself at work with the idea of creating something that was more acoustic than electronic, with the vague notion of jazz, in the Kiritchenko way that is. The album is built from various elements. First there is the piano playing of Kiritchenko, with some guitar parts. To add he added some percussion of his own, mainly a snare and a cymbals, but also he asked Martin Brandlmayer and Jason Kahn to play some real drums. Last but not least he added some insect field recordings from the Crimea area. Maybe the drumming is a bit jazz like, but throughout I didn’t perceive this as a jazz album. But then perhaps also I didn’t hear this to be a microsound album, or glitch or, well fill in whatever you think is appropriate. Its one of those albums that avoids any tags. Postrock, ambient rock, may come close, but then its hardly rock what is going on here. Very mellow music, with an excellent mixture of instruments and field recordings, and indeed to a very minimal extent an album of electronics. That perhaps is the greatest achievement of this disc, to move away so strongly from the old territory and so finely moving into a new one, or rather: expanding on the old one, and create something that may sound like the old one, but achieved with new means. Fine album indeed.

FdW

Musique Machine

Andrey Kiritchenko – Misterrious

Andrey Kiritchenko is a fairly prolific Ukrainian based musician who since 2001 has released over 20 albums- which have seen him dip his sonic toe in the genres such as: electrionca, folk, electro acoustic & drone works. Misterrious finds him offering up a collection of atmospheric often fragile yet harmonic piano pieces; that are lined with field recording elements and touches of guitar, glockenspiel, mouth harmonica, auto-harp, Tibetan bowls. Most of the tracks here see Kiritchenko coming up with a melodic & often atmospheric sequences of piano notes; to which he then carefullly and lovingly builds around a mixture of: subtle often hypnotic yet effective field records elements, crystalline mainly acoustic guitar strokes, auto-harp atmospherics, glockenspiel tinkles and all manner of subtle yet satisfying and very mood setting noise making and percussive matter. The tracks for the most part stay around the four minute mark; meaning that Kiritchenko gets his sonic and atmopshric point over perfectly, but never lets the tracks feel over stretched or become padded.

An enjoyable, highly atmospheric and often cinematic collection of piano based pieces; which are weaved by field recording detail and other instrumental flourishers. And as always with anything on the Spekk label the disk is presented in their distinctive house style oversized folder style- which features rather lovely yet simplistic line drawings by Olga Indovina which fit