♫♪  Guest Mix: Nikolaienko - [Untitled]

Back in June, the dude Birkut premiered the video for Nikolaienko’s “Under The Integral,” taken off his second full-length The Sound Of Pseudoscience. The album — constructed from a passion of “early electronics’ golden era” and built with a laundry list of Soviet era pedals, tape manipulations, and synthesizers — was released in June through Graphical Recordings and Nikolaienko’s own Muscut label. The album itself is stellar, boasting an eerie H.P. Lovecraft audiobook-tracking aesthetic, and the background story is equally compelling. As Nikolaienko explains:

I have been obsessed with digging, researching and listening to the archives of early ­electronic, library, exotica, science fiction and soviet documentary soundtracks since I released my debut album Loops & Cuts Soup in 2010 on Nexsound. Being under the influence of those themes, I decided to reinterpret and fabricate those aesthetics. As a result, I recorded The Sound Of Pseudoscience co-­published by GRAPHICAL/Muscut, made a video for the track “Under The Integral,” and designed the album cover in such retrospective direction. The music is intended to sound like a library soundtrack for a scientific documentary that does not exist, that’s why many of my tracks are 2­-3 minutes in length.

The early electronic influences Nikolaienko mentioned were narrowed down to the most influential of The Sound Of Pseudoscience and compiled into a mixtape. The 30 minutes below are as much a backstage tour of Nikolaienko’s work as a brief, selected history of paleo electronics – take the rabbit hole!

Stream the mix below, and subscribe to our podcast here.

01. Pierre Schaeffer ­- “Cinq Etudes (excerpt)”
02. Joe Meek “I Hear A New World”
03. Popol Vuh ­”Ich Mache Einen Spiegel ­ Dream Part 4 (excerpt)”
04. Bernard Estardy ­- “Asiatic Dream”
05. Morton Subotnick ­- “Silver apples of the Moon (excerpt)”
06. Pekka Airaksinen ­- “Simha”
07. Karlheinz Stockhausen ­- “Kontakte (excerpt)”
08. Ursula Bogner ­- “Expansion”
09. Bernard Parmegiani -­ “Pulsion”
10. Cluster ­- “Oh Odessa”
11. Nino Nardini ­- “Soleil Rose”
12. Harmonia 76 ­- “When Shade Was Born”
13. Nikolaienko - “Solo For A”

• Nikolaienko: https://soundcloud.com/nikolaienko
• Graphical Recordings: http://www.graphicalrecordings.com
• Muscut: http://muscut.org

Chocolate Grinder

CHOCOLATE GRINDER is our audio/visual section, with an emphasis on the lesser heard and lesser known. We aim to dig deep, but we’ll post any song or video we find interesting, big or small.

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