Pavel Milyakov, AKA Buttechno, coming through with the kind of impeccably-produced, trance-inducing deftness we've come to expect.

A kindred spirit of the Oyster Cult, this is a union long overdue. While he’s often found working in horizontal zones, inhabiting the intersection between ambient and downtempo, these are dancefloor dynamics for pure contemplation. Gone is the amorphous abstraction of releases like ‘PSY X’ and the kind output reserved for release under his birth name, instead opting for a lean, hypnotic kind of minimalism.

‘OYSTER57’ picks up where the ‘Inorganic Demons’ LP and aptly-titled ‘Minimal Cuts’ series left off. Saying that, the first three tracks navigate territory gloomier than the aforementioned; uneasy at times but deeply engrossing, smudged and frayed into heads-down interzones of tunnelling throb and icy melodic flourish. Girder-strength pressure primed for metaphysical experience.

Then, like a vestige of the finest turn-of-the-century progressive trance, ’bleeps’ ends proceedings on a slight departure. A showcase of restraint from the Berlin-based maestro and a fitting way to close. More

Repress!
Buttechno presents badtrip, a 2xEP double dropping 4 November on trip. Pavel Milyakov is an artist from Moscow whose sonic explorations have, alongside his peers, helped form a new frontier in the vast realm of Russian electronica. Under his most familiar alias of Buttechno, his eccentric productions form a continual study into the extremes of rhythm-based music and spatial manipulation. badtrip is a complex meeting of the comic and the deranged. Against a droll backdrop of desolate cities and imposing high rises, his productions sit (un)comfortably at the intersection of overarching paranoia and delirious joy. Moulding grotesque distortions into lively rhythmic frameworks, he invites us to a world that is often disturbed, always fun. Drawing heavily on improvisation, as well as his multimedia background, each track is an unpredictable spiral of altered senses. After a highly acclaimed appearance on the latest trip concept album, as well as an ever-growing catalogue of his own releases, badtrip is an essential package from one of the scene's most peculiar talents. More

Buttechno is back with a 6-track album released on his brand new “psy X” imprint (former Rassvet records). While working mostly on the experimental fields lately, prolific Russian producer stepping aside to the dancefloor territory, delivering six minimalistic sounding tunes, which change their intensity from a high-range bpm mutant acid bangers towards a beatless ambient swirls. Keeping their own special groove and deep spiritual flavour these tracks represent artist's visionaire attitude in its best. More

Tracklisting
A1 DX2OV - Coherent Scale
A2 DX2OV - Eliseus
A3 DX2OV - Intersection
A4 DX2OV - LAFS
A5 DX2OV - Loop
B1 DX2OV - O.K.
B2 DX2OV - Sliding on Enamel
B3 DX2OV - Voices
B4 DX2OV - Gossip
B5 DX2OV - Interzona More

Tracklisting
A1 Roma Zuckerman - Nightmare Forms
A2 Roma Zuckerman - Waterfalls Pt.2
A3 Roma Zuckerman - Text Regulator
B1 Roma Zuckerman - Arzt
B2 Roma Zuckerman - Like My News
C1 Roma Zuckerman - Frozen City
C2 Roma Zuckerman - I Play Everyday
D1 Roma Zuckerman - Extra Work
D2 Roma Zuckerman - Juldish
D3 Roma Zuckerman - 4CH005I
D4 Roma Zuckerman - Compañeros More

Tracklisting:
A1 Hoavi - PHASE 7
A2 Hoavi - PHASE 10
A3 Hoavi - PHASE 9
B1 Hoavi - PHASE 5
B2 Hoavi - PHASE 2
B3 Hoavi - PHASE 8

Sales Note
Part of the St. Petersburg underground for more than a decade now, Hoavi (Kirill Vasin) has released on labels around the world since debuting with Cyclones in 2013. With Phases, he joins the Gost Zvuk roster and builds on his previous ventures into ambient and dub inspired house with a six track mini-album that channels elements of his Phobia Airlines LP. The general atmosphere is built through industrial sound design, moving from quick-fire broken beat and woozy downtempo into rhythmic noise and abstract reductivism. The whole thing collides to form a sort of futurist, machinic statement that relies more on rhythm and percussive synth work than the balancing of melody, seeing the artist hone in further on physical modelling synthesis and computer-generated textures. This mission statement only adds to the inescapable sci-fi aura at work, with Hoavi providing a fresh take on the kind of zones explored by luminaries such as Best Available Technology, Vainqueur / Hallucinator and odd moments of The Flashbulb More

Tracklisting:
A1 Nocow feat. Fama87 - Memory
A2 Nocow - Ko Mne
A3 Nocow - Soon
A4 Nocow feat. Shutta - Taina
B1 Nocow feat. Fama87 - Ogni
B2 Nocow - Blizhe
B3 Nocow - Ne dognat'
B4 Nocow feat. Kedr Livanskiy - Dengi Ne Sgorayut
C1 Nocow - Circle
C2 Nocow - Need U
C3 Nocow feat. Fama87 - Temno
C4 Nocow feat. Flaty - Naiti
D1 Nocow feat. Shutta - Anymore
D2 Nocow feat. Flaty - Pozovi
D3 Nocow - Diver
D4 Nocow - Flow
D5 Nocow feat. Flaty - Breath

Sales Note
First rising to global acclaim in the latter half of the dubstep era with 'Ruins Tape', veteran St. Petersburg producer Nocow has fluidly moved across styles in the years since. Moving in a new direction from 2017s 'Ledyanoy Album', which saw the producer channel 90s ambient techno/IDM for GOST ZVUK, these 17 new tracks, and collaborations for the label instead hone in on a vocal-heavy type of ghostly R&B. As an album, Odinocow carries hints of trance, house and polished electronica ('Blizhe') as well as raw broken beat hybrids ('Dengi Ne Sgorayut'), though the primary unifying factor is the voice.

The heavy use of autotune, downtempo arrangements and wistful, machine-distorted human emotion are referenced in the album's title, which translates roughly to lonely Nocow. Whilst past albums have oscillated between steady dance structures and more wildly experimental arrangements, there is a recurring theme of simplicity at play here. Nocow aims to craft memorable songs by harmonising over contrasting ambient soundscapes, from glacial to warm, through to trap/rnb and 4x4 dance-pop.

With such an emphasis on exploring his voice and his songwriting craft, Nocow injects a new level of soul and integrity to his already well-established productions. Odinocow is a departure from his past work in some ways, though is also an example of a musician striving to reflect their truest vision of the self. "By finding yourself, you become able to love yourself, and, as a result, the world. So the album is really about love." More

Tracklisting:
A1 Flaty - U C
A2 Flaty - Upper Spell
A3 Flaty - Intension
A4 Flaty - Tree
A5 Flaty - Lament Pit
B1 Flaty - Strut
B2 Flaty - Goblin Sograda
B3 Flaty - Plural Dogs
B4 Flaty - Nepal Lit
B5 Flaty - Transparent Thought
C1 Flaty - Declare Day Whom To Sleep
C2 Flaty feat. Madteo - Observer
C3 Flaty - IP-Elegy
C4 Flaty - Protokross
D1 Flaty - Blossom For Rest
D2 Flaty - Mint
D3 Flaty - Dolphy
D4 Flaty - NEWS
D5 Flaty - Gard

Release Info:
Gost Zvuk prepare for a busy 2023 with an enthralling double LP's worth of futurist sound design from Flaty. In the game for more than a decade now, the producer, mastering engineer and all-round visionary artist has delivered an impressive range of music across both his own ANWO imprint as well as for West Mineral ltd., 12th Isle, Firecracker and more.

Always content to subvert expectations and blur stylistic lines, on Intuitive Word there is a clear fascination with a spectral, whittled-down-to-its-core type of avant-pop/RNB hybrid. Digital strings, dubbed beyond recognition semantic snatches, re-imagined new age style synthesis and even flourishes of MMORPG computer game soundtracks all combine into something that feels uniquely Flaty. In a sense, Intuitive Word marries ambient sound collage and hyperreal, narrative-style vocal processing. However, glimmers of shoegaze and old 'ethereal' bands (think Harold Budd & Cocteau Twins) crop up on tracks like 'Tree' and 'Nepal Lit', a testament to Flaty's skill for world-building and atmospherics.

Across the 19 cuts there is a recurring theme of choral style, computer generated elegies. A kind of 'cristal trance', in their words. 'Mint' combines these with overtly RNB style vocal samples, whereas darker, more broken beat soundscapes can be heard on the Madteo collab 'Observer'. With plenty of sombre and cinematic style ventures such as 'NEWS' breaking up the album and eschewing this focus on vocals, we find one of the most consistent producers in the current Russian scene delivering what may well be his most accomplished collection yet. More

Tracklisting:
A1 Stanislav Karpenkov - EvpaTrans+
A2 Stanislav Karpenkov - Reefs Flower
A3 Stanislav Karpenkov - ET+
A4 Stanislav Karpenkov feat. Terrence Dixon - Background Data
A5 Stanislav Karpenkov - 1.1
B1 Stanislav Karpenkov - SA-1-rp-5
B2 Stanislav Karpenkov - Telpher
B3 Stanislav Karpenkov feat. Kuzma Palkin - Jet Ski Max
B4 Stanislav Karpenkov - Last Wave
B5 Stanislav Karpenkov - New Keyboard

Sales Note
After three years of deep work, Stas Karpenkov's debut album is released on Gost Zvuk in the form of an abstract, free-form study. The album is saturated with the Black Sea breeze and the natural beauty of the peninsula, a land associated with the life of the author. It's a musical representation of its surrounding reliefs, an ode to the cyclicity of the waves, and a journey through soundscapes. These manifestations of maritime romance also include the experience of co-producing with Terrence Dixon and Kuzma Palkin on a couple of tracks that play an important role in the idea of the record. More

Tracklisting:
A1 The Oaken Chariot - They are looking at us from above
A2 The Oaken Chariot - BIZNES TIME
A3 The Oaken Chariot - Free Poetry
B1 The Oaken Chariot - Wasteland Luxury
B2 The Oaken Chariot - Cleaner than love
B3 The Oaken Chariot - Whirlabout
B4 The Oaken Chariot - Random patterns

Release Note:
What is the sound of the Russian dub? There is a storied history of attempts to adapt roots music to Russian soil, but most of them can be attributed to reggae (the so-called 'northern' variety) rather than dub. Gost has a history with the town of Smolensk. It's home to Gamayun, whose great album Filterealism was released on our label last year. Now Anton, one of Gamayun's members, presents his new duo Dubovaya Kolesnitsa (The Oaken Chariot). In his words, it has no connection to his other band at all and is an attempt to go back to the roots of a genre that doesn't truly exist.

The Russian word for oak, 'dub,' looks exactly like the genre, and the chariot emerged from the name for the group's jams - 'telega' - which can be translated as a cart. All the music here is the result of live improvisations: no samples, just instruments (notably Vasiliy Shilov's bass). These recordings have been slightly edited, and even the almost indecipherable texts are freestyle. There's no place for real riddims in Russian dub: sometimes this record sounds like something akin to dub variations on underground Russian hip hop (and we mean that in the best possible way).

We should also remember that dub and reggae (and hip hop as well) all started as the voice of people. The voice of those who are always in the minority and try not to be silent. The most prominent dub producers and reggae performers were against hierarchy, imperialism, and colonialism - and their music was born out of the desire to protest against it. As Anton puts it, Oaken Chariot, the "Russian mutation of dub," is an attempt of voicing the concern. And he links this attempt to a historic Russian tradition of Foolishness for Christ, also known as yurodstvo. The "fool" in question is not naive at all; he's trying to seem lunatic on purpose. For Anton, the music of Oaken Chariot is a rebellion with a cut-off tongue. Here, illegible speech, full of inarticulate sounds, is a sign of the inability of the statement. But this inability represents a statement itself that is inevitable.

Yet, the music of Oaken Chariot is genuinely fun, free, and mesmerizing (like the happenings of holy "fools"), but we could also approach it more conceptually. Theoretician Michael E. Veal describes dub as a 'postsong', taking the form of "linguistic, formal and symbolic indeterminacy." The duo's faintly eerie compositions call back to the notion of musical hauntology. There is an attempt, without any direct references, to reconstruct the feeling of something that was never there at all. A little nostalgic and very forward-thinking at the same time, the music of Oaken Chariot is best described in its own words. In the opening track, a voice can be heard saying "eto delo v lob," which means something like "it's a straight-on thing." This is very direct, almost in the vein of folk music. This is a great - and, it must be said, successful - experiment in searching for the soul of Russian dub. Simple as that. More

Tracklisting:
A1 HMOT - Instrumentation I
A2 HMOT - Instrumentation II
B1 HMOT - Context
B2 HMOT - Instrumentation IV (Encore)
B3 HMOT - Instrumentation IV

Release Note:
"In the beginning there was Jack... And Jack had a groove." We know this old tale pretty well. But what do these words really mean? And does this meaning even exist nowadays?Our fellow musician and sound researcher Stas Sharifullin, known as HMOT, presents his report Jack Studies in the form of a release on the Instrument, Gost Zvuk sublabel. Formally, it is a reissue of his single Prolegomena to Home Music Ontology, released in 2017 on Cyland. But these old tracks have been expanded, remastered by Rupert Clervaux and complemented by the two new ones. HMOT originally prepared the tracks on Jack Studies for release on Gost Zvuk, so these instrumentations are finally coming home after a long journey. Context is everything - and in the new environment, this music speaks even louder.Originally, house music was associated with HIV/AIDS activism and the fight against racial oppression, among other things - and this was completely lost in translation in Russia. House was stripped of its political and symbolic potential, and Jack Studies tries to show how the context is slowly fading from our memory. But it's not just an observation. It's a tool of light intrusion that the author has already tested in his DJ sets. Once, he says, he played Instrumentation IV (Encore) for eleven minutes at the Kantine am Berghain.Now that we are finally talking about Western and Eastern ways of making it in music, Jack Studies is more relevant than ever. You can see it not only as a joke said louder this time, but also as a critique of modern house music. You can also see it as a reflection on our strangeness to house music and how we can interpret it in our own way; as Sharifullin astutely suggests, as home music. He sees no line between tragedy and comedy, citing the plays of Samuel Beckett as the root of Jack Studies' irony. "They are funny and somber at the same time. To me, this release is sad, but the music here is joyful." Home music is the paradox. But it is also the beginning of something new. And in the beginning there was... what? Jack Studies has an answer. More

Tracklisting
A1 Wulffius - Monotone in G minor
A2 Wulffius - My Cosmic Synthesizer
A3 Wulffius - Frequency Piano Jam
A4 Wulffius - See That. Are That
B1 Wulffius - Heels At The Pebble Beach
B2 Wulffius - Typ Sounds Deep
B3 Wulffius - Grape Bounce
B4 Wulffius - I Am Weird

Release Note
Sorang, the debut album of Yalta native Wulffius, represents his work over the last eight years. The playful creature on the cover, Stone Eater, is based on childhood sketches of producer's father. The name of the album alludes to the first collection of his father's poems, which took its name from a short story by Konstantin Paustovsky, a master of nature writing in Russian prose. Sorang is the name of the south wind that "blows once in centuries", and you can hear its unique warmth in these tracks. There is a sense of wholeness here, and a palpable style and atmosphere that permeates the individual pieces.

Wulffius creates what he himself refers to as "B-sides": something too strange to be danceable, with "complex ease" and rhythmical variety. The music has a charming serenity and beauty thanks to Wulffius' intuitive approach, which is childlike and whimsical in the best possible sense. By the way, Paustovsky wrote Sorang in an hour and a half at a speed writing competition. You can hear a similar spontaneity here, but make no mistake, this is the work of a master and has been crafted over a period of years. It all comes from experience. More

The first vinyl LP by Moscow-based Boris Solomatin also known as DJ Kassir. An outsider from the beginning, this singular producer has shaped his universe around the denial of common sense. Obsessed with absurdity, confusion and weirdness in everyday life, he creates his own narrative where low quality is part of the message. His layering of obscure sound artifacts into psychedelic collages makes the music seem like a sonic counterpart to Russian meme culture. He acts as a modern ragman pursuing the documentation of this delirious post-reality using the language of sound. The album consists of the works created by him and his fellow producers around 2015-2017 and it's truly a blessing that these haven't been lost and are finally available on vinyl. More

The tenth, jubilee release of "Instrument" series is a sudden turning point and immediately changes the rules of the game, anticipating emerging trends. Oleg Buyanov - one of the main GOST contributors responsible for prominent records "True White" and "Height Difference" makes his debut in "Instrument" framework. OL's new release creates a path of complete diverseness - a unique mix of ambient, dub and mutational electronica, though the author's hip-hop DNA is still recognisable.
The release title as well as its symbol flirts with the privacy of communication in the context of its facilities and tools of the present world. Music acts as the info-channel, which provides unseen and coded data to a person from aside. The vagueness of mood, recurrent rhythm changes, and order of arrangement seem to rhyme with the paranoid feeling of being wiretapped. OL (along with another GOST ZVUK resident Flaty) recently had a similar experience of sound synthesis with their Serwed project whose recent LP was released via West Mineral Ltd. The groove of "SORM" is swirling, distorted and sometimes "disengaged"; sound guided by its waves exists in a constant process of decomposition, dissolution and then reassembles in new configurations. More

"Filterealism" starts from the territories where Gamayun haven't stepped before, from the music that only seems to be simple, but in fact it turns out to be very compound. Their recordings are not escapist in any sense of its meanings anymore; the whole album consists of divisions, explorations and adoptions through the personal and collective experience of music-making. The technical side of this sound acts likewise: you can hear a large amount of routine items (furniture, utensils and deformed recordings of the nature) among "conventional" electronic gadgets and live instruments.

"Filterealism" sounds just like some Soviet electronic music pioneer, which had shifted his focal grip from the modulations and synthesizers to all the simple things of surrounding and completed the piece with profounder shot of weirdness and commonplace wondering. And it literally works like a wonder. More

Aleksei Nikitin, whose first release kindled the GOST ZVUK history (and whose brilliantly sparkish "Ledyanoy Album" was issued on the label a couple of years ago), goes back to Ground Zero after his trilogy on Figure and REKIDS' "Atoner" LP. All four tracks of the eighth GOST INSTRUMENT's vinyl present a rather way-out approach, surprisingly uncommon for Aleksei's form style. But this seemed minimalism tends to be valid only at first glance. Starting from plain rhythm, "Elektromechanika's" further groove is drifting on lots of tousled synths. "Far Voices", an exercise in interweaving of echoes and voice samples, ends right at the moment when you expect track's next iteration. The B-side is not without surprises too: the acid beat of "Oasis" rises almost suddenly after drone-alike "Monothone". Summarizing all the above, getting into this record is not only the extremely clear case, but you should also try to play it from random track, or even in "B2-A1" order. More

Five years ago, the expression Russian electronic scene bore a tone of futurology and expectancies rather than a real state of affairs. It was possible to put together musicians of local and genre importance easily in general, but not of significance in national scale. With rise and further development of Gost Zvuk, Russian electronic music achieved power not only as cultural phenomenon within country s borders, but also fully proved to be a thing of international meaning. Starting operations in 2014, the label quickly defined its domains of authority and engagement and created full-bloody community of musicians, where everyone has a special view on his own work and unique sound. The projects presented on this compilation can be rightfully called the contemporary vanguard of Russian and global electronic music.
Each of resonant artists holds his own disparate creative field and impact. However, in this diversity the unity of creation of beauty and ingenuity is born, that distinguishes Russian independent electronica. All compiled tracks perfectly characterize the artists involved, sometimes from extremely striking sides; from HMOT s chaotic improvisations to kedr livansky s ethereal grooves, from unearthly landscapes of Gamayun to undistracted concisions by Ol or Buttechno. Both electric boffinry and club anthems merge into united vision, placed in graceful frame of Rashad Becker s mastering.
Maybe this compilation won t close the question What is the Russian Sound? , which has been arising for more than twenty years. Nevertheless, it is able to give an extensive view on the evolution of Russian electronica in the 2010s. More