In all of Shards’ eighteen minutes, Alexandr Vatagin bares a rare ability to produce gripping sonic art from basic and often immutable materials. Mostly comprised of clouds of hiss, rattle, and hypnotic slices of motorik fuzz, much is blurred and craggy. All the same, each work has a drowsy guitar drone, haunted vibraphone interlude or lyrical string passage that washes carefully through their bodies and sustains them as a slow paced fragmentary lament.
A number of the pieces tune in to oscillating frequencies and static bursts, which build incrementally, forcing the tension to wax and wan, before the violin unfolds slowly and nags away at melodic fragments. With “Stadions”, a noisy bass drone cuts through harsher layers of fuzz, working in tandem with the errant field recordings to achieve a wrenching, guttural impact, until a sweeping cello passage bathes it all in a certain resignation.
As effective and natural as these combinations are, owing to the stolid progress often made by the organic instruments, and the fact that the compositions are rather short, the arrangements often come across as lymphatic. Although suggestive of much potential, a proper full-length is needed in order to properly gauge Vatagin’s prowess.
Max Schaefer
*
