There’s something almost spiritual about these beautiful yet fractured kalimba instrumentals- they feel at times like they’ve been composed by something elemental – a wind-chimed mind in perpetual unrest, a changing season seeking solace, searching for a change to come. These are certainly sounds shaped by a changing world. This is restless music looking for a place to lay its weary head.
These echoing, mesmerising compositions are quietly meditative in their prayer-like sonic mantras – but they possess something close to claustrophobia too; as if the melodies splintering from these beautifully handcrafted instruments are not fully free, trapped in some way within those shimmering, hypnotic repetitions. The darkening world in which these sounds were shaped offers a glimpse as to the conflicting emotions this music needed to capture; a need for hope, for peace, for beauty, but one trapped in the darkness of Lviv’s spiralling night.
Composed during night air raids, loved ones sleeping as soundly as could be hoped, Nechaevsky ventured to the home studio to put these cubist, music-box lullabies to tape. It’s impossible to know how dark the nights of this maddening war have felt for him and his family (or anyone wrapped up in its vile existence) – but this is music that still holds onto a sense of wonder and possibility rippling with quiet defiance against any sense of despair.
Where beauty is not found as freely – it can still be created. And oh how it has been created here! A broken beauty yes, a beauty that has splintered and frayed- but a true beauty still.
And beauty still matters, despite everything.
Beauty still matters…
Thank you Andy.
Written by M.A Welsh (Misophone)
Music | Misophone (bandcamp.com)
