Roma Vjazemski

Handlebar

Genre: ELECTRONIC

Tape

Boomkat Product Review:

Estonian oddball Roma Vjazemski eases Berceuse Heroique back into the original production saddle with a killer suite of wheezing folk-dub synth sketches landing somewhere between Wah Wah Wino, Pretty Sneaky, Aeson Zervas and Civilistjävel!, doing their thing around a Baltic campfire.

The eight part session is the label's first tape of original works since turns by Al Wootton and Tradecraft aka Carrier last year, quietly regaling a slow burning instrumental yarn with lyrically poetic fingers on the keys and in its flickering downbeats. It’s the sort of music that feels to exist in its own dreamy time and space; unfussed or hurried by trend or commercial urgency, happy to glaze over the 3rd eye and unravel to its own atmospheric physics and pace.

With ambidextrous mutability, Vjazemski loosely limns the vibe via lines of rippling rhythmelodic thought on a trip from deliquescent dub minimalism in ‘Wired’, to the alien digi-dub of ‘Cryto’. He variously invokes mountain folk synth spectres in the very Wah Wah Wino-esque lope of ’Nhava’, thru curdled industrial curios on ‘Royal Brown’, and near passing out in a Estonian sweatbox with the wrung-out blips of ‘Sauna Belt’ - reminding us of Bergheim 34’s supremely sick, inexplicably forgotten 1999 bullet ‘Sechstrack’ for Klang Elektronik.

That fine seam of late night suss really comes out best in the glowing tone of ‘5am’ and likewise the smouldering embers of psych-folk dirge in the keening drones and crackle of ’Still Old’ and its ‘Ode to Outro’ like some lovesick mellotron.

Tape (8)