Ilya I Alisa – I Entered The Dark Forest (2011/2015)
- Post-punk
- Alternative rock
- Drone
- Electronic music
- Art rock
- New Weird
- Avant-rock
- Progressive rock
- Dream folk
- Spoken word
- Avant-garde
- Experimentalism
- Ambient
Comment:
Firstly, it is an unusual case; it does mean one has little chance to find out
such sort of music daily because there is little such kind of music around. If
I’m saying it is either a case of art rock or progressive rock then I have
described it partly only. Secondly, it is an idiosyncratic case getting its
boost and apparent inspiration from the Russian culture, from its glorious
part, which is antagonistic to its inferior, the so-called blatnoi (thug) culture,
which cropped up in prison camps in the Soviet Union during the dictatorship of
Joseph Stalin. More profoundly, the issue is highly dreamy as if a reverie
stuck between reality and a hypnagogic state. At times it is imbued with
naivety yet fortunately it will not turn to be pathetic because the nature of
the issue is candid and properly emotive. If to trying to date it this would
probably have happened in pre-historic times when reality and dreams and fears
come into one, when imagination and real things had had a common part. And one
had to come along with it. Of course, the forest was the uppermost ambience and
catalyst for such sensations to Slavic and Finno-Ugrian tribes. In a word, it
was a realistic place, it was a hyper-realistic, and it was a surrealistic
place at the same time. Furthermore, it seems to be filled with a religious
content though being laid down implicitly, not in a raucous manner. For me,
Ilya I Alisa embodies a modern touch by sketching it quite similarly to Animal
Collective in the USA who had principally done it on their two first albums. Of course, by saying it I admitted a little coefficient to the
proposition. Last but not least – by listening to this 12-track issue on the
tape, which is a part of the catalogue of Tallinn, Estonian imprint Trash Can
Dance, it was something of a ritualistic act to change the sides of it. In a
nutshell, it is a staggering outing by Ilya Bogatyryov, which was firstly
issued digitally in the beginning of the 10s.
