Foresteppe will return on October 22nd to Klammklang Tapes with his first release for the Russian label in four years. The project of Siberian musician Egor Klochikhin, the artist’s upcoming limited edition cassette Karaul is a conceptual project that finds him reimagining his previous efforts for the label, 2015’s Diafilms and Kosichkin Tapes. Diafilms is a gorgeous and haunting collection of pastoral, post-folk that demonstrates Klochikhin’s masterful compositional abilities as well as his experimental leanings, while Kosichkin Tapes collages various snippets and passages from a meticulously archived collection of reel-to-reel tapes recorded by an “ordinary Soviet family.”
Discussing the artist’s place in the label’s history, they explain: “In the early days of Klammklang, Egor Klochikhin played a pivotal role in establishing our intentions to create an experiment-friendly musical platform and quickly became one of the label’s defining artists.” Karaul finds the musician reworking his amazing past efforts, but Klammklang explains the musician goes beyond these previous works by adding “a vast palette of drones and noises with some brushstrokes of power electronics, martial industrial, and even meticulously deconstructed club music.”
Additionally, Karaul is informed by the Russian mandatory military service Egor Klochikhin was forced to perform as part of the Strategic Missile Forces in Siberia. Discussing how the title of Foresteppe’s upcoming release plays into the effort’s conceptual underpinnings, we are told that ‘karaul’ designates both “a kind of pompous sentry, mundane army guarding duty, and bitterly humorous call for help.” While all of Russia’s young men are forced into this military service, Klochikhin explores how this “separated male brotherhood” is trained to not question their duty and to be emotionless in the face of it.
In light of his time in the Strategic Missile Force, Foresteppe uses Karaul to refocus Diafilms‘ childlike innocence and Kosichkin Tapes‘ golden-era nostalgia into something more sinister. The album’s title track opens with a catatonic drone that conjures up images of Siberia’s vast and lonely expanse. It’s not long, though, before acoustic guitar threads its way into this icy ambiance, but gone are Diafilms wistful melodies. Klochikhin now uses his idiosyncratic tunings to express a sense of mourning as his rustic approach to the guitar barely hides the scar of a lost innocence incurred during his service in the Russian army.
