Delicate Features

Delicate Features

Sky Of Earth

Not Not Fun

Suburban St. Petersburg unit Delicate Features make sorrowful, mysterious music stitched from a strange symbiosis of trip-hop, new age, medieval lament, and Russian poetics. Sky of Earth expands on the endless steppe meditations of 2014’s The Passenger, sweeping wider and sinking deeper. The album’s 11 excursions into ambient reverie, Eastern bloc Enigma, funereal folk, and devotional electronics share a mood of solitude and contemplation, landscapes disappearing in dusk, plagued by memory. Founding members Radmila Nikogosian and Pavel Astvatsturian variously cite Latvian folk songs, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, funereal black metal, Muslimgauze, metaphysics, and spectral Sade amongst their source material, threading together a vision both bleak and beatific: “We were looking for the state of harmony, and something eternal; we hope the listener will be able to find those feelings.” Cover artwork by Igor Astvatsaturian. Layout by Britt Brown. Mastered by Alex Nagle.

Delicate Features

The Passenger

Not Not Fun

“…our music goes to ambient, and sometimes atmosphere, of disturbance and worry, sometimes meditation. But it doesn’t lie.” So sayeth singer/soothsayer of Saint-Petersburg haunted romance duo Delicate Features, Radmila Nikogosian. We’re fully of the mind to concur. Nikogosian and bandmate/beau Pavel Diakov-Astvatsaturian have been lurking in the off-grid steppes for roughly two years, scotch-taping microphones to fragile percussive objects and folk flutes amidst glowing grey electric swells of depressive sensuality. The Passenger blurs morose misty synth-jazz with windswept new age memory pop into a love-blind stalk along an ice-scarred river – an experience befitting “two misanthropic dreamers who just like to listen to beautiful music.” The original intention apparently skewed more in a dancewardly direction but their grey northern home gravitated the mood into displaced, pensive nocturnal rhythms, often ditching drum forms entirely, like in the keening, cracked classical drift of “Orphan Song” or “Whispering Wind.” The sequencing spills out a story of devotion and dissolve, tracking the whole heavy soul waveform – poetic faith (“Birds Near River”), Sunday morning (“Opal”), body rapture (“Kiss By The Sea”), escape/evolution (“Transparent Shadows”), etc. 10 twilit and tactile songs for staring through stained glass to. Mastered by Alex Nagle. Artwork by Britt Brown.