In Amor Towles’ 2016 novel, A Gentleman In Moscow, the newly-in-place Soviets hand a life sentence of house arrest to an aristocrat. His urban and urbane hotel prison is a concession to his actions during the Russian Revolution, though he longs to return to the forests near his ancestral home in Nizhny Novgorod.
Earlier this year, Kedr Livanskiy (the nom de plume of Yana Kedrina; it means Lebanese cedar) posted how thankful she was to have scheduled a brief tour of countries that are still friendly – economically or otherwise – to Russia. Being Russian and one of the most visible members of its underground electronic scene, the double-whammy of COVID and war sanctions has been crushingly bitter. Though she and longtime collaborator Flaty manifested their Kosaya Gora shoegaze/indie-haze project on this spring’s Kosogor, isolation’s grip reached a choke point.
Kedrina’s feelings on Ukraine were made known at the outset, providing a track for Gost Zvuk’s Stop The War! charity compilation in March 2022. However, this was the extent of her public activism in the months that followed – understandably, given the potential consequences for speaking out. Singles were released in the interim, but, like Towles’ hero, Kedrina’s response has been to close her eyes and dream of what used to be and how to return to it.
K-Notes serves as a love letter to her Western trance and drum-and-bass influences – the music that sustains her while life stalls. Sung entirely in Russian (on Instagram, she posted that her English is “still shit”), it’s nonetheless a very English collection: a flash of light transmitting between Bristol and London. Designed like a truncated DJ set, its five songs build from the sparse, garage-inflected “With Love K…” to the climactic “Stop This Way” – all of which is possibly loaded with geopolitical/emotional metaphors.
She begins in love and teeming with opportunity, “Close your eyes / You never knew such a thing.” The vocals are nonchalant, almost like a scratch track for later replacement. The beat has its tail up all the way through the bridge/breakdown, although a surfacing of witch house à la oOoOO sends an omen into the second verse. “Kayf Mir” enters on crystalline drum and bass, each snare crack emitting smoke; Kedrina’s vocal is confident and at first sounds to be in the throes of ecstasy, but soon it’s clear that her heart breaks and she begs for solitude.
The EP then downshifts into “K-Note” with its two-step garage bent and a slide-whistleish melody that her voice flatly matches in its despondence. It implies that auto-tune has fluttered off on its own and left her exposed: the lyrics say that a dream has ended and branches are twisting around wires. It’s mournful and the only place where she retreats into an Eastern European folk melody. “Reflex People” carries a similar beat and adds sonar tones, but by now the references of love have drained and everyone around her seems to be an empty vessel (possibly a reference to her compatriots during lockdown or the invasion). Its beat disappears entirely after about two minutes, leaving Kedrina’s voice to soar like a funeral singer above church tones.
Finally, “Stop This Way” closes the set with a question mark. Its spoken-word intro is juxtaposed over a tense, trance modulation and an agitated drum and bass pattern. Her fuse has broken: the most confident vocal performance on K-Notes pours out desperation but not without hope. She’s pleading for dawn, for springtime, for love, for humanity.
The last three years have been difficult for Kedr Livanskiy and the future is yet unwritten; K Notes should be reassurance for her. Towles’ novel argues that time can make relics of us without notice, but with perseverance those qualities that date us can be strengths. At any rate, Lebanese cedar is known as the hardiest of conifers in the driest of droughts and bleakest of winters.
