The waters of a different and eerie epoch are coming apart, dissolving the centuries-old silt. Ice is on the move, and a strange world emerges from the depth of the unknown — a world inhabitable just by lucky few. Only those able to transmute the soul’s lead into pure gold can get a sense of it; only those who walk through fire and grow roots deep into the earth; only those who get scattered as shards of tinted glass along the beaten path, where people had wandered long ago and would do so for ages.

Modern Ukrainian music conceives itself as the one on the border between cultures, one on the break of different frameworks and one on the brink of nature. As our receivers pick up the radio waves from the West, the darkness comes from the South, from electrical steppes along the Dnipro river, breathing a chestful of salty air that evokes creative freedom. For many years the Southern city of Nova Kakhovka has been the main producer of Ukraine’s experimental music. Following the velvety, as a hot midsummer night’s dream, albums by Kadaitcha (in collaboration with Andrii Kozhukhar), Yurii Samson has brought out of the fertile black soil a new longplay from his solo project Starless.

The six tracks of the Lezo (Razor) album are more than just a postmodern kaleidoscope of sounds, and more than an alchemic journey of its creator; there’s more to it than a flimsy balance on the borderline between classical avant-garde and electronic music. The cutting edge of this musical statement rips the Ukrainian soil open and reaches the deep-laid tectonic processes, wringing the heartfelt confession: each one of us is the new world that leaps into the abyss to lose everything and then ascend into the electrified sky, scattering into notes and ghostly fires of the night. We all become stars in the starless sky.

Artwork by Edward  Sol 

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