H. Ruine, Mikhail Kireev - Imagined Awakenings (2025)

H. Ruine, Mikhail Kireev - Imagined / Awakenings (2025) (Mestnost, MES028)
Format: WEB, Cassette (limited edition — 50 copies)

The split release Imagined / Awakenings is shared by two Russian musicians, H. Ruine and Mikhail Kireev, who explore the world through sound vibrations. They create compositions that can be described as noisy, rhythmic, minimalist, and even dark, yet always astonishing.

The cover art was generated by code in a mathematical program, with the artists' music serving as the source material for the image. It was created by digital artist Karner Red.

Under the alias H. Ruine works Moscow-based Vlad Lisitsky, an artist and multi-instrumentalist for whom creating music is akin to scientific work in stochastic analysis. Every sound and the silence between them in his works is deliberate, calculated, and part of a sacred formula. His compositions create landscapes devoid of anthropomorphism, yet rich with information about the world outside our minds. Vlad dedicates significant time not only to music but also to photography projects and installations that explore human nature. In this album, he touches on the theme of humanizing electronic landscapes in contrast to the artificiality of neurotechnologies.

Mikhail Kireev, based in St. Petersburg, is a sound artist, producer, and one of the founders of the Birth of Sound label and its associated sound laboratory. He can be described as an explorer of algorithmic origins in music. For Mikhail, the key element of composition is improvisation, generated by algorithms using modular synthesis. He refers to himself as a representative of the "timbre renaissance," and his approach to creativity can be considered academic: his compositions are full of logic, mathematical polyphony of rhythms, the beauty of numbers, and rich in concept. Mikhail thinks as if romanticism in music never existed, stripping sounds of their familiar emotional content and expanding the realm of the subjective to hack the essence of the material.

"The works included in this release were created under the influence of a deep awareness of the value of life and the paradoxical nature of fear born from constant control," says Mikhail. "My sound patches are an attempt to express this process: liberation from control, acceptance of the unknown, and the attainment of inner freedom."

The production and mastering of the release were handled by Fedor Vetkalov, a musician, composer, and one of Russia's leading experts in modular synthesizers. Some of the works were created as part of his modular synthesis course.