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cat-nr: verazität: 043, release date: March 2006, ltd.-edition: 60, `Amur Region´is a concept album influenced by memories of a time as a child. Memories about places, streets, factories quay, malicious beauty, love and pure hatred, life...! The first edition comes in a handmade frame out of wood. | |
The second release of Ctacik a.k.a. Stanislav Popov for Verato Project (see also Vital Weekly 486) and it's nicely packed inside a wooden frame, like a small painting. 'Amur Region' is a major step forward from the previous 'Ego-generocity'. Whereas that one was loaded with a lot of noise, signaling from various radio waves, this one goes into the direction of ambient music. Still of course this not ambient music with the big A spelled out, as the sonic pictures Ctacik depicts for us are way to dark, bleak and post-nuclear warfare like, this is a major step forward in the development of his sound. Working with analogue of digital synths, the radio waves seem to have vanished, well perhaps, they are still there, but we aren't know. New is the addition of field recordings, which make up a big part of the long 'WED66F6' piece, which is the major tour de force of this release. Not dissimilar to many other dark ambient cum drone projects, but Ctacik does a rather nice job. by frans de waard @ vital weekly This is is one of those instances where I am glad that I am of the adventurous persuasion, because this CDr from Stanislav Popov’s ambient project ctacik has one of the most unprepossessing titles that I have yet come across. I must admit I wasn’t particularly inspired by the name or the cover art for that matter, but my sense of journalistic integrity ensured that I put any prejudices (founded or otherwise) aside and delve into what Mr Popov has to offer us. And it has to be said that the music on here is nowhere near as unprepossessing as superficial appearances would lead one to think. The album is inspired by Popov’s childhood memories of the place where he grew up, and indeed it’s fair to say that the sounds on here are somewhat suffused with a patina of nostalgia, albeit a rough one. The Amur region name-checked in the title is in Russia’s Far East, almost on the border with China. If, like me, you are a typical Westerner, then your impression of Russia is of a huge sprawling country with a crumbling infrastructure, run down concrete tenements and thickly polluting industry. Add in the fact Popov seems to have translated himself to the much more congenial atmosphere of Umeà in Sweden, so consequently the pieces on this album present themselves as a mixture of misty crackly nostalgia and rusty industrial noise, as well as a species of faded velveteen decadence, and seen from a much more comfortable aspect – in other words a perfect encapsulation of how we remember things. “Ambient Experience”, the album opener, is a misty indistinct swirl of keyboard-drenched hints delineating an industrial past faded to sepia. Continuing that theme is “Blagoveschensk” (which is coincidentally the name of the regional capital), belching out acid- and particulate-impregnated dragon-smoke into a leaden overcast sky. A place where smoke-stacks breathe out noxious acrid plumes into the cancerous air, like a group of recalcitrant smokers huddled behind the bike shed. Disease and pestilence have found their natural homes here, ravaging buildings and living things alike with bare-faced cheek and impunity. Sclerotic lesions and cankers festoon the very fabric of existence in this place, stripping life of vitality and substituting a necrotic facsimile in its stead. Grim resignation weighs heavily; once in its Rottweiler grip all hope is lost. Track three, “Pionerskaya 14”, for all the prosaic mundanity of its title, reaches back through the barely discernible past in an attempt to wrest concrete images from the grip of memory. Hazy, lazy, fuzzed out six string ambience drifts airily into focus from way off in the distance, while a succession of ephemeral cadences float by, anchored steadfastly throughout by the spinal blipping of a morse-coded message and a distorted froggy voice. What start out as warm fuzzy memories gradually become overwhelmed with a searing grimy bitterness, echoing the run-down crumbling ruins of a revolutionary architecture, both social and physical, gone disastrously awry. “Spring Biased Tap” pulses darkly and menacingly, an ugly death-encrusted underbelly, the carriage-clock chime melody reminding us of a temporal ephemerality along with a musty cobwebbed decay. Blackly mechanical reptilian miasmas stalk “Synopsis”, pressing down, denying the chance of elevation much above a prostrate crawl. The final track, “WED66F6”, fades in in a wistful manner with the faint strain of strings and seagulls, opening out into ghostly echoes and traces of lives and times gone by, a teary-eyed nostalgic essay tinged with a sinister subtext. Hollow knocking sounds, like the skeletal hands of long dead monochrome revenants, presage an attempt to gain admittance to the modern chrome-plated world, deceiving with soothing, whispering, spectral words, only to spread their bleeding sepia plague. Stories and tales wander and parade on and off the stage, ephemeral episodes quickly dispensed with but somehow engineering a lingering echo in spite of it. For the most part, the thematic accent here leans massively towards the filthy, the begrimed and the overcast. Leavening it here and there, though, are hints of something lighter, less soiled, harking back perhaps to a brighter, more simplistic, time. Even in the most benighted of existences there are moments when the clouds part to let the sun shine brightly through, illuminating a dull life. Simultaneously we are reminded that memory can sometimes blunt and soften the sharp edges too, and that hard lines become blurred and fuzzy over the intervening years. Memories can also be misleading, replacing missing elements with suspect inventions of its own. I suspect, then, that there’s a certain amount of the latter at work here too, lending a varnish to everything. That last observation in the above paragraph shouldn’t lead you to the conclusion that I didn’t like this album, or even that I somehow find it suspect. I found it to be an honest look through one man’s memories, as honest as anyone can be, and whether the memories on show here have been coloured by later experience or not is ultimately irrelevant. This is a good, solid, dark ambient album that wouldn’t be out of place in anyone’s collection. However, my only fear would be that, with such an uninspiring name and artwork, many will miss out on a treat. by heathen harvest | ||