Kot Kot - I pni

Something new from Aguirre with this first time vinyl release for Kot Kot, the alias of Russian-born, Germany-based artist, Lena Filatova. The music she makes seems to draw from both locales, a dream-glazed unison of trad folk transcendence and fourth world hauntology, built from tape loops, pound-shop synths and a delicately ethereal vocal. Such a description might immediately lead you in the direction of Brannten Schnure, and you'd not be too wide of the mark, Filatova summoning a similar feeling of purgatorial angst and olde worlde mystery. If BS reconfigure volksmusik into new ambiguous shapes, then Filatova does a similar thing with chanson style melody and post-Soviet melodrama (see album midpoint Ottepel), something like the post-industrial neo-folk of Demion Recio's O Paradis project. This is, in effect, very European sounding music, a layered arrangement of overlapping cultural histories/aesthetics that seems to speak of a world that's gone, or one just beyond this one. Beautiful and eerie fog-of-memory, Sebaldian type fair that sets a uniquely high watermark. Edition of 300.