Nikita Bugaev is a sound artist that hails from the Siberian city Irkutsk, and his strikingly minimal LP Sonm is out now on the Russian label Klammklang. Bugaev draws little distinction between sound, noise, and music, and he generates his compositions from these raw sonic building blocks, processing them using Max/MSP and programmed Monome devices like Aleph and Grid. Following up on his 2015 release Keila (Phinery), an intriguing collection of 19 drone loops, on Sonm, Bugaev takes a bit more of an expansive approach across the nine tracks. While none of the offerings run much longer than four minutes, they are allowed to unfold in time, and as such, they seem to slowly expand in all directions like diaphanous clouds of sentient sound. “Sonm IX” shimmers with an eerie ambience, as metallic pads criss-cross in the sulfuric air. But what is most impressive is that even though Bugaev allows his compositions to be what they will be, without imposing a direction on them, they still maintain their expressive abilities. The visuals for “Sonm IX” are provided by Glia, and they match the track’s sonic content with abstracted grid patterns that roll and oscillate in space, before giving way eventually to flickering screens of white noise.
