Cyclic Defrost

Grundik Kasyansky is a sound artist composer and sound designer who apparently divides time between Moscow Tel Aviv and New York City. In 1995 he formed Grundik and Slava with Slava Smelovsky in Israel. Their 2005 concept album Frogs was the most compelling example of electro acoustic avant garde electronica that this writer encountered last year For his solo project however Grundik has stripped things right back. To the extent that he is working with delicate pitches, fragile textures of static and sharp pin pricks of sine tones, forming these almost intolerable micro symphonies of sound. His main instrument is feedback synthesizer, though he’s also working with radios in which he mines the gold barely off channel, computer and theremin. There are subtle skips, clips, tiny flutters of static as the radios and the digitalia bubble and pop aimlessly. Though generated via feedback these are quiet sounds requiring active listening, possibly best with headphones to block out any extraneous environmental sounds, as otherwise it would be easy to lose some of the subtlety in Grundik’s composition.

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