Starting off with the street noises of current society, this first CD on the Russian Electroshock label by Moscow composer Artemiy Artemiev soon bursts into a fast-moving texture of an unspecified genre, that really is impossible label, should one want to do that.

However, this music doesn’t really belong in the general Western Hemisphere of electronic music, or electroacoustics, as we have grown accustomed to it by the virtue of the experimental masters of Germany, France and Sweden, for example. This CD is more of a pretty anonymous representation of popular or “general” lines of musical tradition, where synthesizers are used to produce melodious music of a sort of timeless quality, with a soft touch.

A couple of pieces are reworkings of works by Claudio Monteverdi.

It doesn’t seem that these pieces were made in an ambition to fall in line with western modern art music, but rather to trod its own path in a more exclusive popular music genre. At times one would even think of this as a continuation of the “back-ground musics” of, let’s say, Brian Eno, but Eno is in a class by himself when it comes to this.

Maybe a fascination with the possibilities of modern electrified instruments was the triggering factor for this the first of many CDs from Artemiy Artemiev.

Something I cannot quite make out on this particular CD is the time references. On the sleeve eleven pieces are defined, but when you insert the CD in the player only two long pieces show up. No index points are found either, to account for this. Maybe the composer just wanted to indicate certain passages in the music by the provided but non-existent index points. Anyhow, in real laser box life the pieces on this CD are 59:30 and 13:11, but if you add up the times given on the sleeve for all the individual and unidentified pieces, this doesn’t quite match up… Anyhow, this mystery is of no importance, and if you like mellow lines of unspecified, soft modern day music, too elusive to label, with certain “electronical” or “concrete” anomalies, you might look into this music.

The second piece (in real world laser box existence) behaves more like a chamber piece of classical qualities. This is indeed one of the reworkings of Monteverdi, and it works quite fine. It’s beautiful music, but still elusive, as to reason or statement, but maybe you don’t need these aspects. Maybe you can just listen…