X.Y.R.

X.Y.R.

Aquarealm: Sub-Aquatic Compilation

Not Not Fun

Companion offering to the recent LP, Aquarealm Mixtape interweaves an array of choice album tracks with a selection of discography deep cuts for a one-hour saga of shape-shifting aquatic bliss. Drawing on the classic X.Y.R. palette of Formanta Mini, Korg M1, FX, a loop station, and field recordings, the mix’s 16 songs slipstream seamlessly, despite being sourced from across a decade of work – testament to the constancy of its creator’s vision and the renewable vastness of his muse.

X.Y.R.

Aquarealm

Not Not Fun

The tenth official full-length by St. Petersburg synth savant Vladimir Karpov aka X.Y.R. is a liquid suite of surreal tranquility, divined and designed to soundtrack the shimmering mysteries of underwater life: Aquarealm. Inspired by vintage Soviet cartoons, nature documentaries, and his own colorful aquarium fish, the album’s seven songs share a mood of contemplative depths and dizzying beauty, adrift in deepwater currents and bioluminescent tides. Hazy tones swell and swirl while crystalline keys, loops, and echoes swim in the periphery, rising like bubbles to the surface.  Karpov describes these compositions as flights of fantasy, born of an oceanic muse as idyllic as it is infinite. It’s music simultaneously serene and cinematic, conjuring blue horizons of kelp forests swaying above rainbow reefs, casting shadowplay on sandy floors. A realm both real and imagined, submerged but transcendent, rippling from the mind’s eye to the great beyond.

X.Y.R.

Pilgrimage

Not Not Fun

Vladimir Karpov’s questing Soviet synthesizer designs as X.Y.R. evoke desolate landscapes, lost worlds, and labyrinthine inner realms but his latest is less destination than journey: Pilgrimage. Comprised of two simmering, serpentine side-long compositions – “Black Monk In The Dunes” b/w “Echoes Of Time” – the album summons a sense of pensive processions across shifting sands, “an internal dialogue with reflections and obscure images,” twilit horizons dimming to starlit mirage. Karpov likens these long-form voyages to temple meditations, “trips in search of something,” looking in as looking out. Whispery pulses of percussion echo under ancient cosmos keys while devotional textures drift like smoke from nomadic encampments. The sound of water in a well or an exotic caged bird occasionally cuts through the holy haze shrouding these ceremonies but the truth of their trance never wavers, the guiding star holds its light, the pilgrim progresses. Attuned achievements by a deepening master.  Mastered by Alex Nagle.  Art and design by Dieter Durinck.

X.Y.R.

Labyrinth

Not Not Fun

St. Petersburg pathfinder Vladimir Karpov coaxes hushed auras of keys, metronomes, fog, and feeling to evoke hazed and isolated realms, traced in altered states. His latest collection—and vinyl debut—maps the maze at “the bottom of self,” subterranean consciousness manifested from decaying synthesizer and shadowed pulse: music for fading torchlight. Labyrinth leads through six misty, mystic chambers of dreams, drones, delirium, and phaser’d percussion, spiraling in slow, sacred arcs, in quest of “the inner world.” Tosya Chaikina’s ghost vocals on “False Angel Lullaby” and “Shadows Of Forgotten Ancestors” bring a whispered hymnal mood, but otherwise the album is ambient and abandoned, obscure meditations along corridors of candlelit runes, “to find the right path, to find the true answer.”

X.Y.R.

Reflections

Not Not Fun

Adjacent assemblage to the Labyrinth LP, Reflections wanders six more forking paths of smeared Soviet synth, opiated percussion, and phaser fantasia across lost, liquid, looping landscapes. Here the X.Y.R. experience oozes illusion, the morass of memory, and spectral static, crescent tones glimmering against warm webs of echo and reverberated rhythm. The dark is depth; the flame flickers; continue. Mastered by Alex Nagel. Art and design by Dieter Durinck.

X.Y.R.

Mental Journey To B.C.

Not Not Fun

Russian Federation ambient fantasist Vladimir Karpov aka X.Y.R. (aka Xram Yedinennogo Razmuwlenuja) usually frames his decaying Soviet analog synthesizer pieces within “illusory worlds” – lost cities of gold (El Dorado), polar oblivion (Arktika), deserted equatorial islands (Robinson Crusoe: Lost Soundtrack) – but his latest collection less conjures a place than a time. The mood of Mental Journey To B.C. is pre-human: obscure landscapes hissing in the heat, shimmering in the dark, uninhabited, unreal. Humid loops of Formanta Mini and smoke-ring keys float over hushed jungle metronomes and moonlit field recordings. 10 shades of prehistoric haze, slipstreamed with temple chanting, distant insects, heavy echo, silhouettes of the subconscious. New Age as Ancient Age; the Portal as Process. X.Y.R.’s escape artistry continues to expand. Tinted red cassettes with red imprinting in J-cards designed by Dieter Durinck. Mastered by Alex Nagel in Philadelphia, PA.