The place names of Eastern Europe are enough to conjure conflicting images of the vastness of nature and the decay of functional modernist industry. i/Dex is the artist Vitaly Harmash and he comes from Novopolotsk, Belarussia. No doubt a lot of it comes down to the stereotypes I was fed as a child while the Cold War was still active, but i/Dex’ music seems to match the æsthetic I would attach to such places I have never seen quite beautifully.
Layers is slightly deceiving as a title – this music is not dense as the name might suggest, but there is certainly a sense of depth present. The 50 minutes of music present an ever shifting sound world of quiet drones and non-sequitar electronic bleeps with the artefacts of digital processing making their way to the surface regularly. The low end hums give me a sense of the industrial, always present and underpinning but never seeking to draw attention to themselves. The dancing and sweeping trebles move seamlessly between beauty and foreboding; just as prettiness settles in a subtle shift to a minor mode brings subtle dread to the fore, though retaining a lightness of touch. Arpeggios sometimes build in intensity, such as in ‘Altal’, but pure melodies are never real given time to settle, the movement is constant. The tracks blur into each other as a single suite, though the sense of constant movement is ever prevalent. Sometimes glimmers of found sound – trickling water, or processed bird song – or acoustic instruments such as glockenspiel, seep through the digital veneer. Digital static becomes more dominant as the album progresses. The balance between the distant and the near is juggled expertly.
I do hope I’m not displaying complete ignorance of something I know little about, but Layers is, to my ears, a perfect soundtrack to Eastern Europe as the ‘exotic’. While using the language of Western glitch and IDM, i/Dex has sculpted an ever shifting, ever precarious and never completely at ease soundscape of fading cities and disturbed countryside which is as evocative as it is delicately restrained.
Adrian Elmer
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