I/DEX: Layers (Lagunamuch Records)

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Posted on Jan 26th 2010 01:06 am

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I/Dex: Layers

I/DEX
Layers
LMC1001
Lagunamuch Records 2009
09 Tracks. 50mins53secs

Behind the rather cold and clinical sounding I/Dex hides Vitaly Harmash, a musician hailing from the industrial city of Novopolotsk in northern Belorussia, who began to experiment with electronic music in the mid-nineties. A first album, Seqsextend, appeared on Ukrainian imprint Nexsound in 2003, and while Harmash has since worked with a handful of musicians, including a collaboration with Pole for the Connections project released on ~Scape last year, he has until now remained largely unknown in Western Europe.

Spanning just over fifty minutes, Layers, Harmash’s second album, is a particularly exquisite collection of brittle electronica, built around nine pieces woven into each other to form a perfectly coherent whole. Harmash works with a vast array of clicks, micro beats and granular sounds which he assembles into fairly minimal, yet somewhat lush-sounding pieces, relying on very little more than molecular electronics. Although Harmash has worked with field recordings in the past, there is very little evidence that any were used anywhere on this record. Instead, he creates layers of textures and arranges them into delicate melodic formations.

If Harmash’s day-to-day industrial surroundings have filtered through his work, it is perhaps more with the use of machines itself than in the resulting music he creates. Indeed, despite the panoply of electronics and effects on display, the compositions have a deeply pastoral feel to them, which stems both from Harmash’s exceptionally subtle melodies, and from the glistening aspect of his finely detailed soundscapes, while the natural flow of the record is greatly enhanced by the constant sonic progression from one end of the record to the other. Each track appears as a component of a much more elaborated construction, which is slowly revealed as soundscapes gracefully merge from one track into the next. While there is a great consistency throughout, the structure of his compositions changes constantly and creates extremely varied areas of light and shade where he can play at length on delicate emotional touches without relying on any gimmick or trickery.

An acutely effective soundtrack, Layers is at once evocative, cinematic and elegant. Vitaly Harmash processes his sounds with great care and manages to transcend the overall cold and electronic nature of his music to create something much warmer and inviting. An album well worth tracking down.

4.6/5

I/DEX (MySpace) | Lagunamuch Records

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2 Responses to “I/DEX: Layers (Lagunamuch Records)”

  1. Julion 06 Feb 2010 at 3:14 pm

    One more free mp3 album of Vitaliy Harmash released in November on Foundamental Network rec.

    You can download it here:
    http://foundamental.net/albums/idex/tetrapolar

  2. […] of the new release, “Layers,” the British webzine Milk Factory had the following to say. “Spanning just over fifty minutes, Layers, Harmash’s second […]