Vladimir Karpov floats fetid Formanta-mini (‘vintage Soviet keytar‘) loops and neo-vaporwave wibble over soft primitivist machine rhythms backlit with a mezzotint of remote insect drone and fictive field sounds.
The usual paradigm for retro-lounge fantasist x.y.r. (‘Xram Yedinennogo Razmuwlenuja’*) is one of illusory worlds–be it lost cities of gold (El Dorado), polar oblivion (Arktika), or equatorial desert islands (Robinson Crusoe: Lost Soundtrack). Here, though, in Mental Journey To B.C. LA ‘Exotic Moods’ Enhancers Not Not Fun host an expansion of his escape artistry that invokes as much as an Elsewhere an Elsewhen.
Vladimir Karpov floats fetid Formanta-mini (‘vintage Soviet keytar‘) loops and neo-vaporwave wibble over soft primitivist machine rhythms backlit with a mezzotint of remote insect drone and fictive field sounds. These synth sketches have one foot in high camp and the other in late-vintage synthesizer art-cum-fetishism. But the camp is de-camped, as, more labor of love than po-mo pastiche, felt more than conceived. Its art may be in artifice, in artefacts–from an archaeology connecting 1987 A.D. and B.C., and x.y.r.’s faux-Exotica a fata morgana of arcane landscapes shimmering in a twilight zone between real and unreal, but, to adapt a phrase about the genuine in creative expression, these are Real Pharaohs in Imaginary Pyramids.
So, from a St Petersburg bedroom bliss bunker of retro-prehistoric glo-fi ultra-dreamwave, or some similar tag happy designation, Mental Journey To B.C. fuses New Age with Ancient Age, Post- with Proto-. And it’s all turned out in a nifty tinted red cassette resplendent in red imprinted J-card design. Plastic fantastic.
*Anorak footnote: nom de disque is drawn from a character in Gogol’s Dead Souls pretentious enough to build his own ‘Temple of Solitary Contemplation’–initials in Russian ‘x.y.r.’ (the artist perhaps mocking his own romantic self-indulgence).
Mental Journey To B.C. is available on Not Not Fun.
