Foresteppe – No Time To Hurry

Limited to 150 copies

Dutch imprint Vrystaete once again out there providing their well-established high grade service with this first time vinyl pressing of Foresteppe's debut cassette from 2013. The work of Egor Klochikhin, a peripheral Russian artist broadly operating within the same post-industrial, folk-imbibed, neo-ambient sonic space as Brannten Schnure, Enhet For Fri Musik et al but with nowhere near their (admittedly still limited) profile, you'll be forgiven for having missed his work until now, only a low-key 2020 album for LAAPS really offering a break from the slew of locally-released cassettes and CD-rs. No Time To Hurry certainly calls for a wider audience, very much in line as it is with the inspirations that have flowed abundantly over the past half-decade or so from Gothenburg, Germany and the diffuse Australian underground. Adopting a collage-like approach reminiscent of Christian Schoppik, particularly his solo work as Läuten Der Seele, the emphasis is very much on the alien-ambient, palimpsestic sound with an uneasy quality, both pretty and unnerving like observing the beauty of nature take an instinctively ruthless turn (roots will uproot, not all will be well). The interplay of samples culled from opposing contextual reference points (US slowcore, Ukrainian cartoons, Russian fairy tales) and Klochikhin's own multi-instrumental playing make for a compelling whole, the acoustic sounds of mandolins or child's accordions made woozy and implacable by manipulated tape loops and found sounds, creating the kind of somnambulist, lost-in-the-dream sensation ordinarily associated with a double drop of valium. But No Time To Hurry isn't numbing in that same way - it plays with context and concepts of memory that are often anything but ambient, the overlaying of multiple sound sources an invitation for immersive, active listening. One-time-only edition of 150. Once it's gone, that's unfortunately that.