In a remote part of Russia, KIKOK has made an EP that sounds like My Bloody Valentine doing Italo disco
Stream the self-titled new EP from the Gnoomes drummer - dedicated to his fading ethnic group
In 2017, Loud And Quiet‘s Daniel Dylan Wray wrote about the story of Gnoomes – the three-piece “stargaze” outfit making music in Perm, a Russian city so isolated it makes London-Glasgow look like two short stops on the bus. It’s 22 hours on the train to Moscow.
That was around the release of their psychedelic second album ‘Tschak!’ which was made, well, without the aid of any psychedelics, after members of the band had been imprisoned after traces of weed had been found in drug tests by the authorities.
Put it this way – in recent years the members of Gnoomes have been making music under the harshest of circumstances.
A year on drummer Pavel Fedoseev, who makes music under the name KIKOK, is about to release a self-titled EP (out Friday 16 March) via Fatima Yamaha’s Magnetron Music label.
In Pavel’s words:
“I wanted to make a release with what I already had – a simple Korg Electribe er MK-II drum machine. I started to jam with it in a minimalistic way, but then I decided to merge my techno experiments into a more dreamy atmospheres and I bought a few synths (Alesis Micron, Arturia Microbrute) and a sampler (Boss Loop Station 202). My main goal was to take some harmonies from My Bloody Valentine stuff, add some Italo disco beats, mix it with the weird samples and see what will happen. Speaking of conceptual part, my Komi nation which I belong is a dying ethnics. There are only 90,000 Komi people left, that’s why all my tracks on the EP are called in Komi language and sometimes I say the words in it.”
Not that you’d want to separate the music from that context, but isolated on its own it’s a mesmerising piece of work. Listen below: