The promo discourse gestures vaguely to ‘something inherently Russian about Bordeaux, about this sound,’ before settling for ‘Tragic, cold, mysterious and beautiful—it is a product of the land whether it is meant to be or not.’ A stereotype perhaps, but with an element of truth to it, presenting as it does against an icy landscape with desolate atmospheres, further pointed by visual linkage to a wind and snow-swept landscape dotted with isolated structures.
The issue of Beautumn‘s previous albums, White Coffee and Northing, goes back a decade, when an almost willful eclecticism saw Alexander Ananyev’s works tagged as ‘a cross between the space music tradition initiated by Stearns/Roach/Rich (and taken on by the likes of Hypnos)’ and ‘something more stately and soundtrackish, perhaps the residue of some of [his] East-european cultural legacy.’ (Northing review, igloomag, 2007). Years on from its production, his latest, Bordeaux, finds release through Infraction‘s solicitous curation.
Nine years on we find a ‘more attuned and concentrated’ (promo blurb) Beautumn than previously, the Russian ambient tsar’s return striking as more subtle and focused, with a naturally minimal air about it; the prevailing dynamic, one of slow rotation and post-classical chord progressions, the familiar figures and fields of his craft—a doleful violin theme here, echoing field ephemera there—radio emissions, the captured air of a water tower, stray through haunted synth sonatas—reticent, shadowy, here spectral, there illuminating. The promo discourse gestures vaguely to ‘something inherently Russian about Bordeaux, about this sound,’ before settling for ‘Tragic, cold, mysterious and beautiful—it is a product of the land whether it is meant to be or not.’ A stereotype perhaps, but with an element of truth to it, presenting as it does against an icy landscape with desolate atmospheres, further pointed by visual linkage to a wind and snow-swept landscape dotted with isolated structures.
Bordeaux is available on Infraction.
