released December 24, 2020

Music constructed/programmed/improvised by Won James Won
Wobbly spoken text in track 15 by Valery Bryusov

Performed by:
Daniel 271 Smirnov – modular suitcase, beats, samplers, synths, recitation (15)
Tikhon S Kubov – voice, samplers, FX boxes, Soma Pipe, piano (15)
Andrew Astro Gankin – acoustic guitar & FX boxes (4,6,7,8,9,11,12)
SALOME – voice (14)

Captured live in 2019-2020 at Arbor (forever in our hearts) and other assorted Moscow art-sanctuaries
Track 15 recorded at James Studio, St.Petersburg and BZDOK Studio, Moscow, July-December 2020
Mixed and mastered by Dan 271, December 2020

Cover art by ZonderZond


“I wouldn’t call classical music peaceful. I think it’s psychotic.”
Karma RX, 2019


“It must be added that on the 21st of July the crowd took the Town Hall by storm and its defenders were all killed or scattered. The body of Deville has not yet been found, and there is no reliable evidence as to what took place in the town after the 21st. It must be conjectured, from the state in which the town was found, that anarchy reached its last limits. The gloomy streets, lit up by the glare of bonfires of furniture and books, can be imagined. They obtained fire by striking iron on flint. Crowds of drunkards and madmen danced wildly about the bonfires. Men and women drank together and passed the common cup from lip to lip. The worst scenes of sensuality were witnessed. Some sort of dark atavistic sense enlivened the souls of these townsmen, and half-naked, unwashed, unkempt, they danced the dances of their remote ancestors, the contemporaries of the cave-bears, and they sang the same wild songs as did the hordes when they fell with stone axes upon the mammoth. With songs, with incoherent exclamations, with idiotic laughter, mingled the cries of those who had lost the power to express in words their own delirious dreams, mingled also the moans of those in the convulsions of death. Sometimes dancing gave way to fighting--for a barrel of wine, for a woman, or simply without reason, in a fit of madness brought about by contradictory emotion. There was nowhere to flee; the same dreadful scenes were everywhere, the same orgies everywhere, the same fights, the same brutal gaiety or brutal rage--or else, absolute darkness, which seemed more dreadful, even more intolerable to the staggered imagination.
Zvezdny became an immense black box, in which were some thousands of man-resembling beings, abandoned in the foul air from hundreds of thousands of dead bodies, where amongst the living was not one who understood his own position. This was the city of the senseless, the gigantic madhouse, the greatest and most disgusting Bedlam which the world has ever seen. And the madmen destroyed one another, stabbed or strangled one another, died of madness, died of terror, died of hunger, and of all the diseases which reigned in the infected air.”
Valery Bryusov, “The Republic of the Southern Cross”, 1903


"He turned his head and saw the dark underside of the clouds, above him now.
Then he heard the singing.
And saw them, in circles around himself, their faces smiling, marveling at his passage among them.
He saw the ranks of angels, the sky filled with them, singing in the gray light. Darker as his thoughts ended, his head filling with nothing, his fall pulling the last bit of himself away."
K.W. Jeter “Farewell Hirozontal”, 1989


© ZveZdaZ 2020