review

/opinion

Oleg has an extraordinary harmonic gift, and so often his music shines with a clear, warm light. This does not happen always, but often. Here it does. The music is like a happy whistle. The sun is shining, the intonations shimmer like specks of light on the grass, the birds are chirping. And in the soul there is a hum, singing, and the anticipation of a miracle. Such is the intonation — a call upward, as if you are launching a kite and the sky answers with bright rays of sunlight. The instruments are not always identifiable, as if you are blinded by sun glare. The ostinato figure changes fancifully and several times turns into something else. It is not exactly capricious, but light.

The second half of the piece (after several transformations) is a reflection of the first. As if you have forgotten about the kite and looked around — and there is so much! One is left to slightly regret that the piece is short. I would listen to it for 20–30 minutes. As if the author is shy of himself or has hesitantly stopped his walk. Beautiful, and a little sad. After all, there is so little happy music in the world! I listened to it several times.

— Alexey Sysoev, composer, Hearing, Facebook, May 26, 2024
translated from Russian

description

/concept

A thread runs through the whole work: a whistling-like E–D–G–F motif, passed between piccolo/flute and clarinet, always slightly detuned either by other instruments or singing while playing, always slightly out of phase. Around it swirls a mass of tiny disruptions—muted strings, plucked fragments, wood tapping and other cheery rubbish.

There are many different ways in which the instruments interact with each other, and one of the examples you might find in the measures starting from m96: the piano and guitar (a little detuned) take on multiple voices playing some kind of white-key old-style melody using finger taps and patafix-muted keys, overlaid by a slower, microtonal but ordinario melody in higher octaves.

At the heart of the ensemble is a hand-built servo motor guitar: several strings plucked by buzzing motors controlled via MIDI, behaving like an alien observer among the other instruments.

Additional non-standard sound sources include the "JBL-Bird"—a feedback machine built from a JBL speaker and Zoom recorder—used to generate controllable sonic and an additional e-guitar with transducers mounted on top of the strings, to generate overtone shimmers.

There is no formal system behind the piece—only intuitive architecture and inner hearing. Each sound is placed with intention, creating collisions that may seem incidental but are tightly aligned.