June '21 by Kirill Shirokov & Ilia Belorukov

originally released on cassette at Zoomin' Night (Beijing)
zoominnight.bandcamp.com/album/june-21

The score for June '21 was made in early summer of 2021, in a dialogical process of close live collaboration. Everything we talked about — music, time, politics, and place — was treated as a kind of material with the possibility of being brought into the piece. We didn’t aim to use sound to express such concepts directly, but rather created music with attention to the circumstances: when it was written, where, to whom and by whom it would be played.

There was a mutual understanding that we were about to make music between the determined, scored, and the unexpected, improvised: the unexpected both for listeners and for us. Our concept was to actively explore the space together with the audience, trying to reach the effect of co-presence, and the ‘in-between’ of the chamber. The listeners' role was important to us. In a careful, imperceptible dialogue, many risky points of play were made possible with the attentiveness present in the space. We played at the New Stage of Alexandrinsky Theater in St. Petersburg — a large institution that was interesting to try and shake from within, by creating the conditions for more experimental sonic explorations. The black box space was chosen because of the silence that allowed us to concentrate our energy precisely in the ways we intended.

We chose to limit the dynamic range to the quiet, which is reflected in the instrumentation. The zither was not Ilia’s main instrument, so he approached the challenge with joy. The objects used on the strings and the body of the instrument made the experience even more playful, at times with no knowledge of what sounds would be produced next. Fluteophone is more familiar to Ilia because of its similarities with the saxophone. It was chosen to contribute with a more classical sound in the selected sections of the performance. Kirill decided to play the material where every sound — tonal, noise, instrumental and electronic — was regarded as separate and independent. This made certain sections consisting of discrete chains of sonic events.

The composition and performance were prepared over seven weeks: from initial thoughts about the concert, to writing the score and setting the instrumentation. The 65-minute long cassette is an edited recording of the live performance, with many rebalanced and recomposed details made afterwards. It is hard to say whether the score we wrote, the walks we took together, or the post-performance minutiae were of more significance for the album. This version is produced for home listening, whilst also attempting to create the feeling of the unexpected that we experienced live.

Text by Kirill and Ilia, edited by Sasha Elina

musician, label owner, concert organizer, sound engineer, writer

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