Following some weird trend of contemporeana in a certain field of sound art, no information is supplied with the CD. I’m used to this from a few subterranean or wanna-be-subterranean labels in Sweden – but I see Electroshock also falls into this trap. I prefer some kind of introductory text or some essay of sorts with the CD. It feels bare and ignorant not to say anything.

However, you can read about the composer on Electroshock's homepage instead, clicking here!

This may seem like a negative way to begin a review, but don’t fear; the CD is very good, very interesting, and unusual, the latter property being the most important to me, since I hear so much new music that fall into a sort of traditional avant-gardism that just makes you really tired. This CD does not make you tired. I chose a few CDs out of Artemiy Artemiev’s stack for 2004 to study a bit more and perhaps write a few words about, and this was the most obvious one, catching my attention right off.
I will give a few impressions of this music, without defining the tracks.

The beginning is soft and gluey and sweeps out like tangible shreds of spider webs, loosely in the electronic wind, bringing on all kinds of associations, but mainly a feeling of pleasure, of auditory pleasure, apparently delivered by a sound artist who knows his art deeper than most.

The gluey, whining insect sounds grow denser and deeper and more relentless, crushing a lot in their way, persuading any listener, luring them into enchanted realms of hearing, where they are easily loosing themselves into the lost and found of audibility, fragments of humanisms passing by in soaring voices, while the audio retreats into oral cavities and the spurting, pressing sounds of compressed saliva march off into the inner reaches of anatomy…

Later the voices are reduced to masked morphemes in the radio hum, the old radio static from shortwave and medium wave, and bouncing, thudding percussion renders elasticity in a very peculiar and original way. Some of these sounds are actually new to me, the way the come across. These qualities are rare in new music!

Storms of Antarctic strength pound and shiver in one of the tracks, deafening, sweeping you away from any sanity that you took for granted before getting lost. The sounds granulate and screech, but inside this hell there are modal forms and shapes, ice-organ music; a stillness in all this crazy motion, an antidote for the forlorn…

Spiraling, meandering growls from alien life forms grow like noble fern across moss-laden ice age rocks deep inside the hearing, in a fairytale movement of brisk qualities, colorful and full of shades and murky nuances; the little ones of the forest seen momentarily in the corner of one’s eye, before the disappearance is total to wake eye! Wonderful, Alexei Borisov!
Now, this praise is another reason why I feel the need for information in the CD leaflet, even though you can study his antecedentia on Electroshock's homepage. When you find a sound artist as good as Mr. Borisov, you feel the need to know more about him, his background, his experiences, his immediate professional friends (to find cultural patterns), his intentions and plans for future creativity, and so forth.

Bellish backdrops sway like Northern Lights as a close up brown fat beat thuds and thunders, way down in subwoofer realms, a breeze of muffled voices seeping through the tightness like high-pressure air out of minuscule cracks in truck tires; dangerous, choral-like; a ritual of dark forces within… and magnificent! The Russian language clearing up, reaching coherence and intelligibility, bringing us back to an – illusive! - here and now of stark reality! … Which seamlessly transforms into a beautiful Russian woman singing without manipulations, as clear as the sun across a summery field of grass and cattle – but, as soon as is starts if gets heavily crushed and deformed, finally entering an environment of static and electric sparks, like the last traces of a world you’ve left behind in an Aniara space ship, forever drifting in the direction of the Lyre…

Alexei Borisov shows a glorious ability to vary his electronic manipulations, always bringing something very interesting, always catching your ear and your full attention, and I especially like the way he utilizes voices and shreds of language, remnants of morphemes, shadowy displays of human activity in a forlorn kind of otherness, dreamy, beyond - sometimes passing the thin line to pure sound poetry! Borisov’s CD is the most interesting and curiously enjoyable one I’ve heard in ages!