Got a nice split tape (HYSTER24) on the Hyster label which arrived from Finland. On it, Russian powerhouse and Chieftain tank owner Ilia Belorukov occupies one side the same way that an invading army occupies a small territory of Europe, while the B side showcases two pieces from the remarkably elfin and poised Jelena Glazova from Riga. ‘Try To Have No One Here’ is Ilia’s advice, expressed as 15 minutes of ominous machine-like humming punctuated with packing crates being pushed around in some Hellish warehouse of damnation. Although there are some field recordings on here, it’s done with “synth clicks and undercurrents”, which is kind of hard to understand in this context, but I always dig Ilia’s attempts to limn an accurate portrait of the urban miseries that blight 21st century man. In this instance his answer is a resigned world-weary sigh of one who has all but given up the struggle.
Latvian goddess and multi-media artist Jelena Glazova was last noted by us in 2015, when we spun her split tape with Grigorij Avrorin and found much to relish in the “disconcerting bleak industrial noise” thus generated. Here she offers up two tracks of her cold, relentless, chattering: ‘One Breath of a Flesh Machine’ is a JG Ballard-inflected title for seven minutes of hideously creepy white noise, arranged in pulsating patterns that strike menace into the heart of any passing human being. It comes to something when we’re perceived as mere “flesh machines” by all the cyborgs who now rule the earth, and presumably we’re in the minority now. For those of us who remain, this bitter blast will be our theme tune…as for ‘Serene Sleep Between Death’s Legs’, this is a quite good piece of process drone with filters and layers a-plenty, but it doesn’t roll forth with quite the same dystopian terror-drive. She makes this music with “vocals, controllers, and laptop”, and demonstrates the same sort of mastery over her equipment as a dog breeder with 15 mastiffs at her command. From 24 January 2018.