From her breakthrough outpouring January Sun to the suggestively titled K-Notes in the summer of 2023, a run of about seven and a half years which brought forth three albums, one soundtrack project and a couple of extended plays, the formula for Kedr Livanskiy’s music remained broadly the same, one of woozy electronics which splayed out over a glacial throb of sunken vocals and scudding breakbeats.
The precise tenor of these missives varied as she captured the essence of eighties house music or early nineties shoegaze, at times hewing more closely to trance, Balearic beat or drum and bass while her breaks occasionally inhabited a jazzy or bossa nova space. And while her musical influences veered widely from the thicketed soundscapes and smeared frames of The Cure to the ghetto electronics of Terrence Dixon and pioneering footwork of the Teklife founder DJ Rashad, from the duo of Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland or the murky peak oil volumes of Topdown Dialectic to the minimalism of Terry Riley and from the Izhevsk electronic scene which flourished around the collapse of the Soviet Union to the Andean airs and startling collisions of Elysia Crampton now known as Chuquimamani-Condori, the artist herself probably best summarised her sound ahead of that first effort January Sun when she wrote:
My music is strongly inspired by Autechre, Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada but with the lyrics and mood of Mazzy Star. I admire contemporaries Inga Copeland and Laurel Halo, however my songs are more pop-leaning because of the powerful influence MTV had on my adolescence.
Guided by this dual sensibility and her spellbinding voice, which helped to make her work sound totally discrete, Kedr Livanskiy’s music has often worked to stunning effect. Whether it’s the motorik chug and reverberating vocals of ‘Razrushitelniy Krug (Destructive Cycle)’ from January Sun, the crisper ‘Ariadna’ the title cut from her debut album with its helical ascents or the wistful ‘ŠŠµŠ½Ń Š·Š° Š“Š½ŠµŠ¼ (Day by Day)’ from Michael Idov’s feature film Jetlag with its punchy, almost painfully yearning refrain, several of her songs are perpetual earworms, some of my favourite and most listened to music of the past decade.
Under the hood some of the changes have been more pronounced. January Sun was produced by Livanskiy entirely in Ableton while for Ariadna she used the Roland SH-101, Roland Juno 106 and Korg Minilogue analogue synths. Then for her second album Your Need the native Muscovite collaborated with the Saint Petersburg producer Flaty for a more thoroughgoing dissection of club sounds, before reassuming the producer’s chair for Liminal Soul which aimed to bridge the analogue and digital, urban expanse and boundless nature from the cherubic bird calls of ‘Celestial Ether’ to the cosmic squalls and foghorn sirens of ‘Storm Dancer’, foregrounding her voice and its crystalline fragments or soaring falsetto though the artist has since talked about the project in conflicted terms, describing the result as ‘stuffy’.
Perhaps as a response to that album, K-Notes was billed as a return to the dancefloor while with her partner Flaty she formed Kosaya Gora, an evocative indie project which served as a marked change of pace. Carting a mobile studio through the villages and hinterlands of their native Russia, they mucked together a motley blend of shoegaze, dream pop and other distortions, psychedelic folk, electronica and loping trip hop rhythms. The spirit of that adventure and its result in the fourteen earthy tracks of Kosogor has inspired a deeper collaboration for Livanskiy’s fourth studio album, as Myrtus Myth hands the musical reins to Flaty who has composed and produced the entire record with Livanskiy writing and singing her own lyrics.
Perversely or somewhat quixotically she also claims that Myrtus Myth is the closest she’s come to Ariadna her self-produced debut. Both records do after all offer a personal take on well-worn mythologies, with Ariadna drawing its name from the Cretan princess who helped Theseus to navigate the labyrinth and slay the fearsome Minotaur before scorned by her lover, she was left on the island of Naxos to suffer a lonesome death.
Kedr’s new album Myrtus Myth meanwhile leads off with ‘Orpheus’ whose descent into Hades on an ill-fated quest to recover his wife Eurydice has inspired artworks from Monteverdi to Sarah Davachi to David Lynch and Mark Frost in the third season of Twin Peaks. Here over wispy, cooing choruses and nymphic synths which sound like something from the soundtrack to a Studio Ghibli film, Livanskiy contrasts Orpheus and his weeping lyre with Eurydice whose ‘kingdom is death’, implying that her own art lies somewhere on the precipice.
Elsewhere conjuring the open road and clandestine or moonlit departures, ‘Zver’ is the Russian word for wild animal or beast and ‘Kali-Yuga’ refers to Hindu cosmology, as the artist – whoseĀ ‘ACDC’ from Ariadna featured a multiplicitous reading of William Blake’s poem ‘The Tyger’ by Martin Newell of the band Cleaners from Venus while Kosogor drew some of its lyrics from ancient folklore, Weimar Classicism in the form of a famous ballad by Goethe and contemporary American poetry by way of J. Blake Gordonās ‘so what’ – portrays Myrtus Myth as a Dantesque journey through each phase or aspect of the self.
‘In the middle of our life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost’ begins the Divine Comedy and Livanskiy an artist preoccupied with forest imagery early in Myrtus Myth finds herself rapt in familiar terrain. ‘Farewell’ contains visions of foliage receding into a damp fog but Livanskiy embraces the past and duly forgets it with a spirit of defiance as Flaty through a few muted horns and shimmering synths begins to construct an enveloping soundscape. Then on the lead single ‘Anna’ the producer summons up melodies redolent of Fleetwood Mac in their Rumours era plus Phil Collins and the gated reverb of his drums as the singer recalls one autumn in an attic, the dust still sparkling in the sunlight by way of a heartfelt tribute to an old friend.
Through the blur of influences and references, the clearest way to recommend much of Kedr Livanskiy’s past music would be to say that you might enjoy it if you were ever drawn to the blazing torch anthems of Molly Nilsson or the elven early work of Grimes. This new album on the other hand with its shift away from dance structures and newfound embrace of live instrumentation is more folksy and dreamy, instead of the dancefloor summoning sights and sounds which might stretch from Laurel Canyon to the Scottish lowlands as Livanskiy and Flaty conjure the folk rock or soft rock of the seventies and early eighties or the slippery dream pop of Cocteau Twins.
Looped sighs and chugging rhythms define ‘Night Trains’ and its sense of vague hopefulness and interminable stall. While the singer’s voice has often been described as ethereal, that doesn’t adequately portray how Livanskiy manages to inhabit the centre of her compositions and ride the beat while at the same time often sounding like she’s clawing her way out of some gaping chasm or hole. The anxiety and quiet desperation of ‘Night Trains’ allied to the trundling wheels of Flaty’s production show that her music on Myrtus Myth at least retains its familiar churn.
‘Zver’ encodes a tale of medieval chivalry or hexen fantasy while ‘Spades on Hearts’ with its standout vocal is both a deft slice of power pop and an impassioned battle cry. With equal nods to ‘Purple Swag’ from A$AP Rocky’s era-defining mixtape Live.Love.A$AP and Lana Del Rey’s tragic ballad ‘Summertime Sadness’, the opening to ‘Purple Sadness’ clearly gestures back to the cloud rap of the early 2010s with its woozy synths and autotuned vocals before ceding to a languorous account of lilac tears and distant planets while the trippy ‘Agata Dreams’ introduces sleek downtempo or boom bap rhythms to Livanskiy’s naked world of ice and darkness, on a song which overtly channels the French-Canadian pop star MylĆØne Farmer.
Despite a certain continuity of place and theme, Myrtus Myth is generally more upbeat than its predecessors as Livanskiy seems to enjoy stretching out her voice over Flaty’s diverse palette, though for all of its merits the production here is typically more involved than on some of her earlier hits, which were defined as much by their whirring repetitions or frost-nipped minimalism. The album takes the first part of its name from the myrtle which is a symbol of love and beauty, fertility and a certain restful grace, flowering native to the Mediterranean region.
The industrial lurch of ‘Smoke and Ashes’ is indebted to both vaporwave and the syrupy somnambulism of Juice World or the Drain Gang collective, but Livanskiy adds a spectral portent to her careful and clear-eyed depiction of our sacred detritus before the drag and drone of the song feeds into the lightly loping ‘Easy Rider’, a propulsive track and about as close as Kedr Livanskiy gets to Sade.
It’s another brilliant and apparently effortless vocal from the singer, with a call to stay ‘true to the path’ and keep trucking life’s winding course. At the same time life in Russia and beyond these days seems to carry a certain unshakeable tenor. ‘Kali-Yuga’ the closing song on Myrtus Myth ostensibly relates something of Hindu cosmology and the Yuga cycle, with the Kali phase believed to be our present age, one characterised by sin and strife, ignorance and decay, the fourth, shortest and altogether worst of the four yugas.
Eerie and spare as Flaty shrouds her voice in wispy echoes and what sounds like a plosive repetition of the word ‘burning’, Livanskiy – singing as she does throughout the album in Russian – begins to paint a picture of silent shadows under cold canopies of trees and pearly skies reflected only in puddles. Apostrophising the titular Kali Yuga she speaks of frozen dreams and deserted cities of a type immortally cast by the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in his sonnet ‘Ozymandias’, which eyeing a half-sunken statue and its shattered visage serves as a treatise on the fall of rulers and civilisations.
Limning war and ecological catastrophe, sifting the sand as ‘Kali-Yuga’ and Myrtus Myth draw to a close, here Livanskiy instead reminds me of another poem, this time by her compatriot Osip Mandelstam who was raised in Saint Petersburg then moved to Moscow around the time that his second collection Tristia was published overseas. Landing in 1922, well before the Stalinist purges of the thirties, his poem which was later quoted by Anna Akhmatova reads ‘We shall meet again in Petersburg / as though we had interred the sun in it / and shall pronounce for the first time / that blessed, senseless word’.
It is the type of sentiment Livanskiy shares as with a ghostly flicker and the lulling quality of a siren she remembers how ‘People used to live here and the sun laughed / Songs rang out around, and life smiled’. Fond and steadfast in other words and much in keeping with the rest of Myrtus Myth, even as the deserted city gasps and breathes its last.
