(he/them)

Artist statement Being born in Russia to a Ukrainian family into the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse and later migrating to Europe with no possibility of returning, has defined my work for many years, permeating it with a sense of displacement and dispossession, while also fuelling my fascination with transient, shifting identities inherent in sound. Beginning my artistic career as a jazz musician, I worked in a variety of projects ranging from classical and baroque music to experimental jazz and free improvisation. In recent years I prefer to work on sound art or improvise in smaller groups of electro-acoustic musicians. My approach combines field recording with hand-crafted audio-processing tolls in Pure Data.

Working Process I’ve composed and recorded the entire track in Pure Data, using Ableton for mixing and mastering only. I often work with random processes and probability and draw my inspiration from electromagnetic listening, so normally my workflow consists of preparing relatively long sections in PD, 30sec to 2min in this case, listening back and selecting pieces that work together best. The first step in my process was to watch the video several times and try to describe what I see, and mark every important “landmark” on the timecode. After few experiments with the music, however, I have decided against trying to match the image with sound completely, but rather make the sound match the image in mood and essence. In the end I’ve decided to divide the piece in 4 loose section. These became Intro+Flower (0-1:36), Field (1:36-3:47), Stretti (3:47-4:24), Recap (4:24-end). I liked a sense of shimmering shifting identities the visual produce, and tried to match them with all the permutations of the voice sample and the lower drone in Flower, Stretti and Recap. I used this project as an opportunity to experiment with a vocoder patch from a tutorial by Alexandre Torres Porres. I think the voice part trying to fold itself into a proper phrase, but constantly failing at that, conveys well how the shapes from the video constantly promise to shift into something familiar but never fulfilling the promise. The other aspect contributing to this feeling is the lower drone, which is originally a combination of a feedback synth patch I made awhile back and a field recording, that sounds like an enveloping ambience, but is unsteady and always in danger of breaking into a train of short pulses. For the middle section, Field, being the most intense, I’ve decided to choose a more “extraverted” feel. I’ve used an emulation of Mutable Instruments’ Plaits module from PD’s ELSE library combined with my own older patches for the ambience. The granulated sample of a breaking glass put through the vocoder patch mentioned earlier is heard on the foreground. In that patch the order of grains is decided upon by a simple Markov chain, creating flowing organic patterns. There are two short subsections where the flow of Field gets broken. They may not fit too well with the image, but in my opinion they contribute to the disorienting feeling the video produces. The last two sections function as a recapitulation of sorts. They return to the ideas introduced in the beginning but have a more subdued tone to match the video.