The present album was planned in a spontaneous manner and put together in a rather short period of time, within a month, in December 2009. I did not work in any studio, but sat at home and played all the solos in the pieces on a MIDI-keyboard connected to a MAC PRO computer. The orchestrations of these pieces were made by me prior to that by means of the Logic Audio 8 program. So I had to fill in those fragments of the compositions where I would have played the saxophone in most cases. However, I understood that, no matter how hard I may have tried to avoid it, the saxophone sound itself, its timbre and dynamics would unwittingly bring in a tinge of jazz into the album. My objective was to go as far as possible in this project from the traditional conception of jazz, to approach contemporary chamber music. Or, at least, I had in mind to approach such varieties of it as “New Age” or “E.C.M.”
All in all, this album became the continuation of the idea of the “Mount Cimmeria” compact disc, released by the “SoLyd Records” label in the early 1990s. at that period our listeners were overwhelmed by a permissive wave of the formerly semi-underground pop music, which washed away overnight everything that was substantial in Russian musical life. In our time the situation has stabilized. Many genres have established themselves firmly in the sphere of the so-called “subculture,” whereas the “pop music” which replaced it has divided into two categories – “disco-pop” and “glamour,” which essentially are little different from each other, except for, most likely, the category of their customers. On one hand, there are the losers and the riffraff, on the other hand, there is the youth from the “high society,” which consider themselves to be the elite. In such a situation I unwittingly feel myself to be a lonely dandy, and even a snob, trying to suppress the negative emotions arising from my contacting with the manifestations of mass culture.
Many of the pieces were written in the summer and fall of 2009, and were meant for live performance, either by the “Arsenal” ensemble or by the “Ars Nova” trio. I think that it would be interesting to compare their electronic versions with the way they sound when performed by live musicians.
This album is to a certain degree directed towards the most advanced among the Russian “yuppies.”
