The second Artemiy Artemiev CD out of Moscow company Electroshock is called “Cold”, indicating the overall atmosphere we can expect from the eight tracks. The sound is surprisingly easy-listened. This definitely does not belong to any of the difficult-listening lists you can find on the net. It’s smooth, stroking, fondling, as indeed winter and cold can be, provided you’re out of it, or in it with the right clothing. However, I don’t think Artemiev sought to display a naturalistic painting of winter in Russia, but rather to express winter as a state of mind, as a mood or a feeling, a base camp for travels into inner spaces.

The strokes of sound inevitably creates ice castles of the mind, where light diffuses through the icy walls, and you set your bodily body down in the midst of this ice castle on a reindeer fur on the floor, letting the overwhelming light of sun and ice curate your innermost illnesses of mind and soul, and maybe this is where this music may take you, to reconsiderations, coming-to-termness, a rest within a rest.

Anyway, Artemiev’s artistic skills have moved a lot since his first CD, “The Warning”, and makes one curious as to what might show up next from Moscow.

When I first ventured into Artemiy Artemiev’s music I had the expectation that this would be electronic music in the sense that I define it, from the pioneer works of Rune Lindblad, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Jean Schwarz, Bernard Parmegiani and so forth, but I have come to realize that Artemiev’s production belongs in a completely different vein, which by confusion of terms mat be confused with electroacoustic or electronic music, namely “electronica”, which defines a latter day occurrence in the flow of modern music, like “dark ambience”, “new age” and so on. Maybe I’m too old, and maybe that’s why I didn’t realize this at first. This makes the listening experience quite different from what I thought it would be, but with that realized, it’s a pleasure to explore these long stretches of inwardness.