Popped up yesterday on the YouTube, even if already uploaded on other platforms, the hazy abstract, down by the water video, gives me the opportunity to highlight an artist I do admire.
Chikiss is the moniker of more than talented Berlin-based, Belarus-born, St.-Petersburg‘s singer-songwriter, musician, producer, dj, and analogue synth finest, Galina Ozeran who, in the last decade, has produced a wide and full-bodied range of genre-defying music, as a soloist or collaborations, (I absolutely love her collaborative project with Brian Pyle of Ensemble Economique called Video Salon), from synth-pop, neo-classical, shoegaze, dreampop, noise, drone, ambient, elettro-acoustic, avant-garde.
Chikiss‘ last, composed in a “free abstract deep fantasy” mode, home-made album “New Season” released at the end of 2017 via the excellent DIY L.A.’s cassette label Not Not Fun, is her most atmospheric and experimental to date and was born out of an episode of a ‘loss of voice’ during a tour of Finland, that inspired her to “explore a more muted and shadowy form of electronic song-craft using only breath and synthesizers, evoking the condition of a ghost”.
In a touching, evocative and minimal album, made up of solar letfield pop moments, otherworldly uncanny synth cosmic ballads and exhausting and fluctuating hypnotic waves of dense and nebulous ambiences, between the latter is rooted ‘To The Sun’, a personal oniric blend of ambient and drone soundscapes, along her sparse ghostly texture vocals in the background, that slowly develops from the claustrophobic and foreboding premises, a vivid feel of being deeply immersed under the surface of the water, into mesmerising salty keys froths traced and erased on the sand in a hazy, contemplative and dilated coda of an apparent interior peace drenched in melancholic longing, while outside the world slips relentlessly towards its self-destruction.
Dig her work, you’ll be easily enthralled and captivated.
Keep up with Chikiss :
