suokas
karelia
In the icy dawn of a village, a human voice or the creak of a gate will resonate with unusual clarity
Голоса на деревне или скрип ворот раздаются по студеной заре необыкновенно ясно
Ivan Bunin, “Antonov Apples” (1900)
Sergey Suokas is based in Karelia, a beautifully forested region of northern Russia that hides the Finnish border with fir trees. Suokas’ lineage extends both sides of that same line. He is a local luminary and advocate for regional talent, while collaborating with Karelian labels like widely-respected Full of Nothing. Moscow magazines have spoken of his “dark output pondering the nature of being. Or, to be more accurate, emptiness and the passage of time.”
Of late, his attention has turned to “blurring the edges between techno and classical music,” a bolder sense of experimentation that is grounded, surprisingly, in a lack of musical education. A fan of electronic recordings since childhood, he escaped all formal training except for the drums. To this day he remains grateful for that bold amateurism: “I still savor my freedom of incompetence. I want to discover unpredictable results for myself without any predetermined mental patterns or rules.”
The same intrepid spirit is not waning. Suokas’ newest compositions were inspired directly by the Indian myth of White Island, a transcendental realm known in ancient Vedic texts as Shveta Dvipa. Upwards and onwards––or vice versa.