But topography, albeit figuratively, still figures as Labyrinth‘s decaying synth and faded sonorities eponymously model meandering inner zones with ‘six misty, mystic chambers of dreams, drones, delirium, and phased percussion, spiraling in slow, sacred arcs.’
On Labyrinth, his vinyl debut for LA Exotic Moods Enhancers Not Not Fun, retro-futurist synth seer x.y.r. ‘coaxes hushed auras of keys, metronomes, fog, and feeling to evoke hazed and isolated realms, traced in altered states,’ (blurb), seeking to tap into ‘a kind of inner world of man, who is trying to sort out their thoughts and feelings to find the right path. to find the true answer, the person to have to make a deep dive to the bottom of himself’ (blurb).
Though Vladimir Karpov‘s discog appears to point to a preferred paradigm of fantasy worlds–whether lost cities of gold (El Dorado), polar oblivion (Arktika), or remote desert islands (Robinson Crusoe: Lost Soundtrack), and Mental Journey To B.C. channels ‘as much as an Elsewhere an Elsewhen’ (igloo ’view), the St. Petersburg imagineer professes to be ‘inclined to associate my works less with a time or place, and more with a mood or atmosphere’ (Tiny Mix Tapes). But topography, albeit figuratively, still figures as Labyrinth‘s decaying synth and faded sonorities eponymously model meandering inner zones with ‘six misty, mystic chambers of dreams, drones, delirium, and phased percussion, spiraling in slow, sacred arcs.’
Recorded and hand-played on analog synths and a basic battery of boxes beloved of the bedroom bard, ‘ambient and abandoned, obscure meditations along corridors of candlelit runes’ play out from a post-Eastern Bloc party bunker of lo-fi Kosmische ultra-dreamwave; as Formanta-mini (‘vintage Soviet keytar’) loops of etiolated aether-atmo—a couple with a hushed hymnal tenor courtesy of Tosya Chaikina’s ‘ghost vocals’—slide over a remote pulse of soft mechanics tinted with remote fields, Ages, Nu, New and Old alike, dissolve in fictive fusion.
(Trainspotting note: nom de disque ‘x.y.r’ stands for Xram Yedinennogo Razmuwlenuja (abbrev.), Russian for ‘Temple of Solitary Thought,’ the name given by a character in Gogol’s Dead Souls to a little summer house where he would sit alone and ponder the world.)
Labyrinth is available on Not Not Fun.
