Lilly — Architectonics
The white label CDR comes in a hand-painted white card slip sleeve- this takes in strokes & thick lines of two shades of grey & black paint. You also get inlay card- this features a glossy monochrome college on one side, and printed track listing in Russian on the other side. The album came in an edition of 37 copies, and it appeared in late 2017, so all been well you should still be able to get your hands on this.
I’m most aware of Mr. Maklakov’s work for his HNW project Light Collapse, and I guess in a way you could say Lilly connects into this side of things by it’s sustained & locked down take on ambeince/drone that's utilized on all of the five tracks featured here.
As mentioned early all the tracks ( as well as this album's title) is in Russian; but sadly M[m] aging system doesn’t cope well with this language- so as a result, I’ve translated everything to English. First out of the bag is "Edges"- this just over seven minute is built around the melding & shifting of a ringing slivery tone, and a mid-range horn like simmer/ hover. Over the tracks unfold these tones seemingly switch places in their dominance.
As we move through the album we come to track number three, this is the title track, and the second longest track here at just under the thirteen-minute mark. It’s built around a slowly fading cluttering like tone bell sustain, this is surrounded by a deep haze of smudge mid-to-lower ranged drone matter. This track rather brought to mind a feeling akin to the drone tracks on the Swans Soundtracks For The Blind- but of course without the dialogue samples.
Finishing off the album we have the longest track here "The Shore Of The Dream"- which comes in at the sixteen minute & forty-second mark. This brings together a fairly shrill mid ranged sustained ringing & circular scape element, with a hovering drone. The drone seems to be on a constantly sustained fade, with the top elements threatening to deepen & noise drone out, but they never do. The track creates an effective feeling of trap simmering tension and is a perfect end to the album.
Architectonics is all about simmering & sustained drone craft- sometimes it’s sinister, other times its tense, and others times is starkly moody. The albums not really reinventing the ambient wheel or particularly distinctive, but if you're in the mood for attention focusing ambience with a simple drone make-up it could well be for you.