The fourth solo project by Artemiy Artemiev in Moscow is an “electronica” or “ambient” venture into the atmospheres of age-old Asian cultures, by way of interwoven sound textures of Asian origin. Artemiev rolls out a carpet of sound to trod, leading through an Asian hall of mirrors, camelback riding the ancient silk routes, smoking water pipes with old shamans in Tuvan yurts and tasting the fevers of desert illnesses that mangle your mind.

You sense that you’re just a continuation of something, that that old human mystery runs through you and beyond you, and you’re not only the traveler; you’re being traveled, a stepping stone for bouncing genes, a flow of old and forgotten causes, making their way through your measure of years on the planet, flowering some time later, when you’re just a forgotten past, or a myth out of decaying ages, or “some dust in an old man’s cup who is tapping his foot to a tune…” (Leonard Cohen: Stranger Song)

The mystery is always here, that is what is, and that’s it. This music by Artemiev induces these feelings, these thoughts, and the beat goes on, the beat goes on, as the days of life flicker past in an ever-increasing speed, where time finally is a meaningless property of existence, and where the vibrating superstrings of the Universe make everything “from toy guns that spark to flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark…“ (Bob Dylan: Gates of Eden)

And the winds of fall get chillier, as the leaves rustle along the sidewalks of earthly human cities, where the soul takes cover from the urgent questions out of the existential abyss.
It feels lonely, this feeling, but who knows what existence is, what a human being is, or what our cause is here (for we are demanders of causes by ill-fated nature…) This music puts this into some kind of anthropological perspective, from Rift Valley to Wall Street. Who the hell are we?