It feels a bit odd to add a record that is a) archival; b) has out of Ukraine origin as all these compositions were recorded in rather Riga or Tallinn. But I'll keep up with the Shukai label politics and broadly define it as Ukrainian because I don't want to lose such a gem to some other scene. I guess nobody would.

It was definitely wise of the label not to release Valentina Goncharova's recordings collection all at once. Although I wasn't that impressed by the first part of it when that came out, on the re-listen, it started to feel like a roadmap for the final, and evidently, main, piece. Thanks to collaborators (Alexander Aksenov (1), Sergey Letov (2,3,4), Pekka Airaksinan (5,6,7)), Goncharova's electroacoustic epiphanies move further to fully realized compositions, at once free and elegantly restrained, electrically charged and drony. Although deeply rooted in the avant-garde tradition, many of these pieces provide a certain level of DIY boldness to feel just as timeless as they are free-spirited.