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Calling and ringing ambience, phantom field recordings and imaginary dub sequences - shimmering sound-art electronica from the debut album by Ganna Bryzhata aka Bryozone delicately captivates with the elusive intimacy of the sound, dissolves memory and dreams under the moon surf.
“Eye Of Delirious” is a long-awaited debut Muscut release of Chillera’s band bass player Ganna Bryzhata — an Odesa-based artist. An ambient LP is a Smoothy Flow Sub Nautical journey that features elements of an industrial dub of Glowing Sirens of the Black sea.
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Ganna Bryzhata’s ethereal, shape-shifting electroacoustic experiments feel equally conducive to beatific calm and deep melancholy.
Some artists require a certain measure of distance to thrive. That’s the case for Ukraine’s Ganna Bryzhata, aka Bryozone. She’s best known as the bassist of Chillera, a trio of dub aficionados who developed a gently psychedelic style of space rock in their adopted hometown of Odesa, a port city on the Black Sea. The three once considered moving to Kyiv but ultimately decided that life in the capital wasn’t for them: “It’s great to come for a while, to feel the active movement, but it sucks up the energy,” they told an interviewer in 2019. “You need to be more self-organized to live there. We are still not able to bring this chaos to order.” You can hear that refusal to adapt to the rhythms of the big city in their instrumentals, in which Afrobeat basslines and surf licks churn as blithely as the tide, unconcerned with anything beyond maintaining the breezy vibe.
A similar sense of willful isolation characterizes Bryozone. Bryzhata’s solo music is a world away from Chillera’s, trading their warm blues riffs and wah-wah twang for ethereal loops and icy, atonal drones. But both projects share a timeless quality. Chillera’s records sound like they’ve spent decades gathering mold in some beachside community thrift store; Bryozone’s output might conceivably have been rescued from the flooded basement of a mid-century tape-music studio. Perhaps even more than Chillera, Bryozone is bubble music, promising an insular journey into inner space.
Bryozone’s music has changed considerably since her first two EPs, 2013’s ACID FROG DAY and Ifrit. Where those records remained tethered to familiar strains of lo-fi techno and ambient dub, Eye of Delirious, her debut LP, leaves such recognizable terrain in the rear-view mirror. Across 10 varied tracks, Bryzhata explores a series of mysterious, shape-shifting visions that feel conjured out of thin air—not so much the products of silicon and circuits as the phantasmal afterimages of lysergic dreams.
The sea’s rhythms hold sway over the opening tracks. “Smoothly Flow” channels tidal rhythms into a swirl of watery synths and foghorn drones—loops upon loops upon loops, submerged in a thick, grainy paste of tape hiss. It’s eerie and emotionally blank, equally conducive to beatific calm and deep melancholy. “Sub Nautica” pairs a plodding 4/4 pulse and muted dub bass with rolling waves of synth; the influence of dub—a music of ocean currents and cultural exchange—speaks, perhaps, to Odesa’s historic identity as a mercantile city. “Ghost Tribe” and “Liminal Tribe” spin hand percussion through eerie tape effects, turning pitter-pat rhythms into insect chirps and alien soundscapes; they evoke the work of Jan Jelinek, Andrew Pekler, and Muscut label head Nikolaienko, who similarly have reexamined vintage ethnographic phonography through an experimental electroacoustic lens.
Some of these tracks aren’t “songs” at all—more like tricks of the light captured on foggy deadstock film. “Sequence One” arrays dissonant chirps and chimes into slippery arpeggios, somewhere between a circus carousel and a flickering asphalt mirage; “Glowing Sirens” and “Ambiency,” imbued with the otherworldly timbres of Sarah Davachi’s Vergers, suggest Aeolian harps, or long metal wires strung across a cavernous tunnel. The closing suite ventures furthest into the penumbra. The title track recalls the haunting expanses of Seefeel at their bleakest; “Fateful Torment” and “Ground Floor” are full of clomping footsteps and ominous electrical buzz, steeped in the doleful, otherworldly frequencies of mid-century explorers like Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram, Pauline Oliveros, and Else Marie Pade. These are the most difficult pieces on Eye of Delirious, but they might also be the most rewarding. Bryzhata’s coldly keening frequencies luxuriate in their desolate surroundings, making ghostly tendrils of feedback feel sumptuous. Resolute in their isolation, they offer an alluring glimpse of oblivion, a hand-delivered invitation to disappear. - Pitchfork, By Philip Sherburne
From Odesa, sound artist Ganna Bryzhata evokes the hazy ambience of the "Black Sea Paris"
The Muscut label, celebrating its 11th anniversary, describes its music of interest as ‘pseudo-archaeology’. On their website, you can see a fabricated photograph showing the uncovering of a cassette tape during excavation. Their releases focus as much on the music as the quality of the sound itself – how the equipment and methodology influence its texture and timbre, what are the side effects of the medium, and what the impact of analogue instrumentation would be.
Looking at the catalog, you’ll find input on meditative structures, hunting loops, or specific archaic sounds. Nikolaienko uses a tape player and an old reel-to-reel recorder balancing musique concrète, loops, and pulsating motifs. Nikolaev makes mesmerizing synth passages, whereas Eyot Tapes incorporates cassette loops, spring reverbs, tape delays, and a modular synthesizer. As a result, they create hazy compositions packed with delay effects and reverbs, often based on swirling loops.
Bryozone, the project of Odesa-based sound artist Ganna Bryzhata, follows a similar path. Until now, she released two EPs in 2016 but also plays bass guitar, creating psychedelic dub trips in the trio Chillera. Eye of Delirious offer transcends haunting and dreamlike landscapes to provide a peculiar tale. By its atmosphere, it’s difficult to disconnect it from Odesa, a sunny resort known as the Black Sea Paris or the ‘city of dreams’ as Charles King wrote.
Bryzhata has recorded a heterogeneous album that sometimes draws a little on the ephemeral atmosphere created by William Basinski or Philip Jeck in their looping pieces. Her hazy ambient strands in ‘Smoothy Flow’ are reminiscent of the feeling of decay present in the music of the two mentioned composers, leaning towards monotonous impressionistic waves, as in ‘Ambiency’. In ‘Glowing Sirens’, the glitchy melody transforms into metallic ambient and creates a ghostly sound, mimicking something vaguely identifiable. ‘Sequence One’ reminds me of a stuttering record, a looped piece, an artifact that brings back memories.
However, she does not fall into the obvious cliché of a hazy, indistinct, and impressionistic aesthetic – the neatly arranged compositions assemble into a diverse mosaic. She breaks ambient, dreamlike tracks with underlined beats. There is a moment of cracking the impressionistic suspension in the style of Deadbeat’s or Sun Araw’s dub synth beats, as in the pulsating trance of ‘Sub Nautica’. Sometimes it veers towards rhythmic, quasi-tribal forms as in ‘Ghost of Tribe’.
Fortunately Bryozone is not singing and not going in a dream-pop direction – this is a non-obvious, evocative, in a way visual, and narrative soundtrack to the journey to the Black Sea coast. Or elsewhere in the middle of hot summer, as this album with scraps of rhythm, melodies, and hazy vision of sunny afterimages catch with a very impressive and suggestive story. - The Quietus, by Jakub Knera
Ukraine’s Muscut keep ‘em coming with Odesa artist Bryozone’s bittersweet, subaquatic ambient fantasies for fans of Spencer Clark, Jürgen Müller, Pataphysical
‘Eye of Delirious’ is the debut album by Ganna Bryzhata aka Bryozone, who hails from the historic Black Sea port city of Odesa, and also plays bass in the band Chillera when they’re not making this type of beautifully detuned dream-food. Following in the glistening wake of work by Pavel Milyakov, Stanislav Tolkachev and Nikolajev on Muscut, the album arrives with no mention or implication that Europe’s most tragic war in a century is occurring in the background, as Bryozone proceeds to project 40 minutes of transportive music as elegantly alien as jellyfish.
The 10 tracks are defined by a taste for curdled silicon and and elusive ambient contouring that lends the lushest, disorienting listen. Slipping in head first with the silty early AFXian pads of ’Smoothy Flow’ the set vacillates strains of dub techno and impressionistic ambient in an effortlessly enchanting flow from he sliding pitches of ‘Sequence One’ and the seductive harmonies of ‘Glowing Sirens’, to limn Atlantean creatures with Spencer Clark-like animism in ‘Ghost Tribe’. They tease beautifully buoyant ambience into more quizzical, queasy space on ‘Ambience’, and the likes of ‘Liminal Tribe and ’Sub Nautical’ recalls Cru Servers weirdo club slosh, before it shores up in a submerged ‘Ground Floor’ like an imaginary soundtrack to Ballard’s ‘Drowned World’. - Boomkat
A dubby, subaquatic journey into the Black Sea.
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Bryozone has not been chilling in Chillera. The Ukrainian artist is a bass player in the band, who create wonderfully breezy music in spite of their hard work ethic. The trio was formed in Odessa and takes inspiration from surf rock and lo-fi indie, channelling the experience and lifestyle of a smaller port city. They've put out two EPs on the renowned Muscut label and organised a festival to bring attention to Ukraine's south.
The sea is a core part of Chillera's identity, as it is for Bryozone. On Eye Of Delirious, the artist's first solo venture in seven years, she nearly perfects a specific type of aquatic beat previously heard on Ifrit, her ambient techno and dub EP from 2016 that carried over Chillera's beachy vibes.
Listening to "Ghost Tribe" on Eye Of Delirious, a visual association pops up from my memory—a moment in an Armenian cartoon where a mermaid stares into the camera with her wide eyes. It's creepy, psychedelic, and captivating. On this track, beats bubble and Bryozone evokes an underwater civilisation where this kind of character could live. With "Liminal Tribe," she makes this realm even richer with rolling, spaced-out beats that create a whole universe of creatures. It's as if she's painting a landscape. Her synths roll like waves on "Sub Nautica" and cut like frigid, winter seawater on "Sequence One." She uses field recordings—or, rather, sea recordings—to add ambience, but it's her supple rhythms that are visionary.
The album's simplest track, "Ambiency," digs a deep valley to enjoy the peaks of more adventurous tracks. I wish there was more of this contrast on the title track and "Fateful Torment," which stumble into the LP's climax with weighty, post-apocalyptic drums. On "Smoothy Flow" and "Ground Floor," Bryozone uses a decaying filter, like a dying gramophone, that ties the LP to the rest of Muscut's releases and nods to the label's archival work. Eye Of Delirious is a dynamic portrait of life under the sea and it's worth diving into. - Resident Advisor
credits
released September 1, 2023
Mastering by Gennadiy Boychenko
Artwork: Volodymyr Pavlov
Graphic design by (DN) daynight.info
Neu Medieval and Heymland typefaces by KTF
Riso print by Hands on Press
Muscut, 2023
Est. 2012
Muscút (Ukr. Мускáт) — etymologically is a syllabic abbreviation of two words: Music and
Cutting.
Record label focusing on pseudo and practical audio archaeology.
Sub-label: Shukai
Distribution: [email protected]
Booking: [email protected]
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