The four pieces on Antiheart are rich and repetitive, like the seasons of the year, which in fact appear on the album, as Bondarev makes discreet textural use of field recordings to accompany his piano, guitar and electronics.
Nikita Bondarev is from Berdsk, less than twenty miles as the crow flies from Novosibirsk. Might as well be a million miles from everywhere else or right next door, for the music of Speck is steeped in a common emotional reservoir but expressed with the exotic originality of a hermit (he refers to himself as a “Siberian loner.”)
The four pieces on Antiheart are rich and repetitive, like the seasons of the year, which in fact appear on the album, as Bondarev makes discreet textural use of field recordings to accompany his piano, guitar and electronics.
“Tremor” is a chamber sonata, sweet and humble but aged and fragile, a yellow-ivoried piano in a nineteenth-century drawing room with starlight beaming through the skylight. “Foretime” is a warm drone that circles itself like a cat in search of that perfect position before lying down. The title track is the most spacious, so reminiscent of the ensatellited atmospheres the Eno brothers and Daniel Lanois created for Apollo. “Eraser” loops one, then another violin, delicate and substantial as a spiderweb. And the entire album crackles as if transmitted over Siberian ham radio.
Antiheart is available on Eilean.
