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LP
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BLACKEST 067LP
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2018 repress. Sleep-deprived, breakbeat driven vignettes of unclear authorship, from somewhere west of Lake Lagoda, near the Russia-Finland border. Sekundenschlaf has significant points of correspondence with contemporary European electronic music, as well as the golden age of (early) jungle and ambient techno. But its response to tradition, and to the zeitgeist, is idiosyncratic to say the least -- with an atmosphere and psycho-geography rooted in the tranquility and majesty of Western Russian nature, and the anxiety and distress of the country's post-Soviet working class. Pastoral calm meets dissonance and unease. The music has a loose, improvised feel, but its arrangements are intricate, its melodies iridescent; cascading arpeggios that stir a sense of optimism and renewal, sighing string-pads that evoke the deepest melancholy. Rhythms simultaneously hyped-up and burned-out, collapsing in on themselves as they race to destinations un-known. All bound together with field recordings of eavesdropped conversations, blurred into abstraction, a droning subliminal menace.
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