Bezdna
Tracklist
- Вестники (Harbingers) 4:25
- Холодная (Holodnaya) 7:13
- В поисках выхода (Searching The Way Out) 7:24
- Штопор (Corkscrew) 5:32
- Плавая в Земле (Swimming Ground) 7:56
- Без дна (Bottomless) 4:26
- Прозрачность (Transparency) 9:07
- Вглубь (Deep Down) 10:18
- Ничего (Nothing) 9:00
Voice - Yuri Mamleev
Composed, recorded and mixed by Evgeny Voronovsky in 2003-2005 using soviet synths:
ANS (8),
Polyvox (1, 3, 5, 7, 8),
RMIF-TI3 (3), Faemi Mini (4),
Yunost-21 (1, 5, 6, 7),
Formanta UDS (3, 5),
Venetz AP-01 processor,
Tom 1501 (8),
LM 1229 delay.
Other instruments: violin (3, 6), accordion (6), SP-303 (1), SP-808 (1-8), piano (2), voice, samples and tapes.
Dmitriy Vasiliev, Monochrome Vision, 2005
What brings a classically educated violinist to end up as a dark-industrial factory-hall sound wizard? The answer may only know Evgeny Voronovsky. We don't have to worry about it and should be thankful that this Moscow based artist feels very home in such musical niches.
"Bezdna", actually the third album by CISFINITUM, dives deeper still into the individual characteristic of the idea behind the project and removes more consequent from the products of other genre artists. It's not the musical treatment of a specially placed theme, but the thematic translation of the sound itself, which gives this release a particular status. Each sequence and each widely expanded, unfixed sphere is only concerned with itself and mirrors infinitely in the blending and echoing of the single tone-tracks. The music stands still although it dies with every split second - it's the momentary sound occurrence that passes away whilst its non-material framework stays like a fingerprint in our mind, which accumulates and intensifies the whole thing. Well, this thought may apply to nearly all records, though here it is present with an exceptional transparency. For this phenomenon Voronovsky used a bunch of old Soviet analogue synthesizers, amongst which also the legendary ANS contributed its fair share to "Bezdna". The result is a rough and sizzling sound character that has nothing in common with the soft and vague playback of digital electronics. With an anarchic and metallic atonality, pieces of inserted spoken words and the humming of electric fields the first two tracks reveal to us the mysterious sector in which the listener will dare into. We are situated in an imaginary, automated power station that confronts us with total isolation, where the human being only exists in shortly translucent memories and ancient radio samples that integrate in the crackling background. Tarkovsky's "Stalker" wanders like a ghost through this construct. But well, this all is not really exact, because it is almost impossible to detect "Bezdna" with local aspects. This music is completely devoid of a physical component, it emerges from the loudspeakers and dissolves within the room. Ethereally and abstract it may be slightly touched most likely with headphones. Beyond concrete and material imaginations "Bezdna" creates a hermetic idea, which varies in its meta-stabile form between meditative harmonies and noisy brainfucks. Though more and more these both appearances merge to one sound amalgam whose precise intensity is strongly reminiscent of BAD SECTOR. Voronovsky reaches the cold at the ground of the sound waves, but it is an utterly inner cold and not the temperature you may feel on your skin. In the course of the album, out of this solitude grows a feeling, which turns out as a melancholic sub-tone. "Transparency" here shows the strongest connection to the beautiful, depressive "Landschaft" release. A softly distorted snowstorm, grounded by low and sad spheres, interlaces to an image of the human winter. This passage of "Bezdna" is singularly in its hypnotic potency and will remain unsurpassed for a long time. At the end, Voronovsky lets the Russian writer and philosopher Yuri Mamleev get a word in, extensively experimenting with the phonetics of his spoken "ничего" ("nothing"). The intellectual proximity between Mamleev's negation of the existence of the world outside the "I" and CISFINITUM, which actually means "endless logic of non-existence" is hereby undisputed.
The very young Moscow label MONOCHROME VISION presents here with its second release a philosophically pregnant work, which will persistently influence the ambientnoise sound for the future and distinguish as a revelation not only for lovers of Tarkovsky and Soviet synthesizers.
Roy Liebscher, Lichttaufe (24 September 2005)
Of course you know the Theremin, a Russian innovation for the production of electronic music, and perhaps, the Coil fans know the ANS synthesizer. But the former Soviet Union produced more synths, like Faemi, Yunost, Formanta and Venetz. They are used, alongside with violin, accordion, a 3003, a 808, piano, voice, samples and tapes on 'Bezdna', a full length CD by Cisfinitum, the sound project of Evgeny Voronovsky, of whom I know virtually nothing. The nine tracks on his album are pretty much inspired by ambient music. Slowly peaceful music that slowly glides by, with sometimes a nasty sound pushed away in the far away background. In 'Transparency' there is a far away new agey voice howl, but that's also kept to a minimum. The influence of Brian Eno is never far away, I'd say. But with a track like 'Deep Down' he proofs to have nothing to do with new age at all. The fact that Cisfinitum uses old Soviet synthesizers doesn't mean much I guess: he manages to make them sound like regular synths. Like many current day ambient albums, this is nothing new under the sun. But at the genre itself, this is particularly good one.
Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly #478, week 23 (08 June 2005)
Another utterance of dark-ambient from this contemplative Russian project. Almost all tracks feel as if they could be performed live, some of them may be recorded in real time, such is the distinct concrete sound of them. But then that idea is blown out of the park by a piece like track five, 'Swimming Ground', a georgeous piece of gossamer texture and emotive moaning that goes on and on to a distant end, like Koner or winds across a dark arctic. This inhospitable piece of audio fiction is kept from totally plunging the listener into some other place by the mechanical keening that softly waves in and out like slow bursts of cyclone. This is a project to watch, Cisfinitum are destined to make some great works if they can keep their heads together and don't go for commercial electronic ambient or try to break into movie soundtracks. Although this could have stood in for the the excellent work on the recent Solaris remake. Vince Harrigan, Manifold Records (12 July 2006)