“Here we have two active forces from Ukraine’s experimental music areas. In the left corner Edward Sol, working with lo-fi, rudimentary equipment, analogue synthesizers and cassette. He has his own Quasi Pop and Sentimental Productions labels, whereas in the right corner we find Kotra, also known as Dmytro Fedorenko, whose music is rhythmic and made with digital means. He has the Kvitnu label.
The record, according to the press text, was made in January 2014 when the streets of Kyiv were full riots and Federenko was about deliver bottles, gasoline, gas masks and the usual ingredients for a riot, when he got a call from Sol asking to pick him up as his car was broken. They discussed what was in the car, and then the story gets a bit blurry, about a sharp axe and that it was left behind. Or some such.
On this 12” there are four pieces they recorded together, some twenty-five minutes of music that sounds neither like Kotra nor like Sol. It happens that with collaborations like this that one player has more say in the final mix than the other, but this time we truly have the best of both worlds.
The rhythm of Kotra is sampled together, I would think, from the lo-fi machines of Sol and it’s transformations are played out by Kotra and also fed back to Sol, who takes matters a bit further. It is music that is almost like a living organism, feeding on each other’s input; one can’t exist without. No sounds from Sol to start with means no rhythms from Kotra, means to further transformations by Sol and Kotra and ultimately, perhaps, no starting point from Sol.
Maybe this is not how this record was made but that’s how I hear the four resulting pieces. It is not like many of Kvitnu’s releases based on a heavier thud for the dance floor, but something that is raw, loud and noisy, with an industrial riotous beat going on below. Maybe it is music for a good old-fashioned riot indeed. A call to arm!”
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