Shchedryk by PMJ1Ø4

Shchedryk is a Ukrainian folk chant dating back centuries, traditionally sung to welcome the New Year. Built around a hypnotic four-note bell motif, it’s a piece of music that’s travelled improbably far - from village doorways and winter rituals to concert halls, pop culture, and eventually becoming the melody behind a certain globally famous Christmas song that may or may not be associated with a bespectacled wizard and an inordinate amount of flying candles. You know the one.

Across six interconnected edits, the album moves through shifting interpretations of Shchedryk — from fractured, trip-hop-influenced collages to long-form progressive and trance-leaning atmospheres, before closing on shorter, darker, and more unstable reworkings of the original melody.

The opening tracks focus on chopped beats, rapid stylistic shifts, and textural manipulation, treating the source material as rhythm and noise rather than theme. The middle section slows the pace, allowing the music to breathe through hypnotic grooves, evolving pads, and extended arrangements, with one track featuring a rare, restrained exposure of the Shchedryk vocal itself. The final pieces return to the melody more directly, but in distorted, haunting, and deliberately chaotic forms, bringing the album to an unresolved, wintry close.

Throughout, the emphasis remains on analogue warmth, late-night pacing, and emotional ambiguity — club-aware but introspective, rooted in UK electronic traditions rather than festival-driven EDM.

This album treats Shchedryk not as a melody to be quoted, but as a structure to be dissolved and reassembled. Across these tracks, fragments of the original motif are stretched, reversed, blurred, and reduced to texture - sometimes barely recognisable, sometimes momentarily exposed before sinking back into the mix.

The edits lean heavily into UK-rooted electronic traditions: trip-hop’s weight and restraint, progressive house’s long-form patience, and atmospheric club music designed for late hours rather than peak-time theatrics. Tempos hover around 124-126 BPM, grooves stay hypnotic and unforced, and emotional movement comes from slow evolution rather than drops or hooks.

There are no vocals in the conventional sense. Instead, memory, rhythm, and atmosphere do the work —- bell tones treated like ghosts in the circuitry, analogue basslines breathing underneath, and grooves that unfold gradually over extended arrangements. Melancholic, wintry, ritualistic - but never static.

This is music for late-night listening, long transitions, and introspective dancefloors. Old melodies, re-heard through fog, tape hiss, and time.

PMJ1Ø4 is a Manchester-based DJ, collector and explorer of house, disco and progressive electronic music. Experimenting with AI and sound design - mixing digital curiosity and a lifelong passion for the dancefloor.