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
More about: Dmytro Nikolaienko, Nikolaienko
