Tuesday 16 July 2019

Regular Citizen - Sleeping Unique


Surprising as it may sound, “Sleeping Unique” turns out to be a perfectly apt name for this debut album.
Regular Citizen is the pseudonym of Ivan Olegovich, a drummer/studio engineer/DJ who grew up in the Russian port city of Nakhodka. His Bandcamp self-description of this debut album says,
“In his uncompromising debut, Regular Citizen hums the tunes of his daily mood storms with 12 minimalistic electronic compositions. Ordinary life is nothing but a curtain of dreams, a display of emotions and circumstances made unique by his sensitivity.”
The description and album name are both absolutely, strangely, on the nose. The album has an unreal, dreamlike quality. While the tracks diverge widely in their tone and pace, Olegovich manages somehow to stitch them into a coherent and fluid whole, creating in the listener an experience as of cycling rapidly through related dreams. Or perhaps this ‘mood storm’ is more like being trapped in someone else's dilemma, witnessing different stages of an internal, personal argument play out, as new ideas – point, counterpoint, resolution – take up the mantle. With most of the songs clocking in around or under 2 minutes in length, you feel a sense of uneasy urgency, which is heightened by the regular use of irregular synth jabs. The more ambient tracks, like “Touching Softness,” wouldn’t be out of place in a sentimental animated short film. The album was released through Lorenzo Senni’s Presto!? label, and while the similarities between Regular Citizen and Senni himself are clear, Regular Citizen is very much doing his own thing.

No comments:

Post a Comment