Nocow - Ledyanoy Album

Pitchfork 74

No matter the sanctions, headlines, or politics, there’s a steady trickle of music making its way out of Russia. Platforms like Soundcloud and mega-giant Facebook clone VK allow a mostly unencumbered flow of mp3s from the world’s largest country to western markets, and the Gost Zvuk label is one of the foremost purveyors of underground electronic music seeping into the US.

Familiar names like Buttechno (aka Pavel Milyakov), OL (Oleg Buyanov) and Piper Spray have already graced Gost Zvuk’s 12 releases to date across their three sister imprints. Gost Zvuk’s releases often feel austere and impenetrable to non-Russophones, each record hand-stamped with Cyrillic text. However hard it is to translate, Gost Zvuk has been a reliable source of heady, otherworldly beats and sketches since their first release in 2014, a four-track EP from one Aleksei Nikitin—better known as Nocow. Now on their seventh release, Gost Zvuk brought Nocow back into the fold with Ledyanoy Album, a shimmering 16-track portrait of IDM, atmospheric sketches, and weightless techno inspired by the six-month long St. Petersburg winters.

With a title that roughly translates to the “Ice Album,” Ledyanoy uses a thumping techno pulse—cold, but not quite hypothermic. “Alunogen” rides a breakneck 160bpm beat, like a train running off its tracks, while opener “Stalaktit” (“Stalactite”) lingers in two minutes of feverish polyphonic static. In spite of such a division in tempo and having written some tracks as many as seven years ago, Ledyanoy Album coheres around the rich atmospheres Nocow creates. The delicate, minimal-techno pulse of “Satew” (“Network”) pumps warm blood through veins as frosty bells spin around your head. Cold air is no threat when you’re properly bundled up. In a recent interview, Nocow said the album feels cold, but “not in terms of an absence of emotion. Space is also cold but it is not frightening, more so mysterious.”

This relationship between cold sounds, cosmic textures, and warm feelings pervade Ledyanoy, and the album’s most rewarding moments are also its most emotional. The uplifting flute and punchy tech-house beat of centerpiece “Tayut Ogni” (“Melting Flames”) reflect a sunny Ibiza imagined from midwinter St. Petersburg. The atmospheric electro jam “Uskoreine” (“Acceleration”) similarly benefits from its warm emotional core as the gliding strings and hand drums bring a lively, tropical feel to an empty crater on the moon.

When the clubby beats disappear on Ledyanoy Album, Nocow conjures dense interludes that recall the rich, lo-fi textures of Huerco S. and Aphex Twin’s SAW II. From the slow-motion plunge of “Ledorub” (“Ice Axe”) to the return-to-earth fireball “Plachushchaya Kometa” (“Crying Comet”) and meditative echoes of closing cut “MIR,” the atmospheres are feather-light and all-encompassing. Aside from “MIR,” Nocow seems to have abstained from the inclusion of field recordings in the tracks, leaving the album without any terrestrial reference. Nocow’s kick drums bang his tracks back down to earth, but across Ledyanoy, you’re either being whipped around by the frozen wind, or floating in the abyss.

The artwork for Ledyanoy features a winter landscape by the 19th-century post-impressionist Russian painter Igor Grabar, whose evocative scenes are both static and bursting with life. Grabar himself, like Nocow and countless other Russian artists, was fascinated by the complex and often surreal experience of the Russian winter. “There is nothing to compare with a colorful polyphonic moment,” Grabar once wrote, “such as a winter day full of frost, where color scale is changing every minute, evolving into fantastic shades.” Where one might see a winter’s day frozen, still and white, Nocow weaves a restless and vibrant collage of a frozen land ready to inherit the thaw of spring.