Originally issued by Ascetic House as a small limited-run cassette release in early 2018, PLYXY's debut EP Gloryland will now be available on vinyl and digital formats by Hallow Ground.
Haunted by the pressing question, "What if?," the five compositions on Gloryland aim to create, in the words of the artist, Ros Knopov, himself, "a hyper-visual audio landscape of a world somebody listening can fall into and drown in."
The term "nostalgia" originally referred to the longing for a place. The nostalgia that informs Gloryland is PLYXY's longing for his cultural-geographic roots while feeling adrift in an alien environment. Born in Dnepropetrovsk, then the rocket-making capital of the USSR, Knopov immigrated to New York City as a child in 1989. In Gloryland, he dives deep into his uneasy childhood memories and their warped reflections. PLYXY marks the unreliability of his recollections by making it heard - the anthemic qualities of the five pieces are coated in an opaque layer of dream-like textures. From the elegiac opener, "It Will Be Beautiful," to the blaring rhythmic noise of "March of Youth," the greyscale picture painted by Gloryland becomes more and more refined below the surface.
PLYXY's search for a past is, however, less a sentimental journey, and more a radical confrontation with the politics of memory and the materials that serve as mnemonic devices. Gloryland draws on field recordings from Knopov's adopted hometown New York and Soviet films as well as performances from his collection of analog and digital keyboards, with the results filtered and re-textured through the producer's modular synthesizer setup acting as the final editorial layer in the creative process. The result is lush and warm throughout, but also demure and distant. While Gloryland might thus easily be pigeonholed as a hauntological record, it is one only in the term's most radical sense. After all, any "What if?" might turn into a "Why not?"
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