“States and transformations”

Some notes on the album “States and Transformations”.

Extended notes, as they say.

Maybe it’s old—fashioned, but I’ve always liked the idea that being an artist (and a musician is an artist in a sense) means watching what’s going on in the society around us and reacting to it in some meaningful way for me. I love contemplation as a phenomenon. I love it even more as a process. This is a special, meditative pleasure. Like a tea ceremony. Tea leaf dance in gaiwani. It’s like to walk, inside the Los Santos game world. Just walking around. And watch. Find the points of contact and intersection of digital and real. It’s like diving to the bottom of a pond and back. Only this reservoir is sound. Where are you looking for your real self in the space of digital and analog devices and technologies.

I feel the need to explain what it is and why.

“States and Transformations” is an album of living the moment in the moment of its embodiment. In a moment that is both present and future at the same time. The experience of living the moment in the moment of his residence. The past is dissolving now, creating the future in the present. Where the real (the performer’s playing, physical interaction with the instrument, the implementation of musical expressive means, techniques, dynamic nuances) and the invisible, as if not real and ephemeral (thoughts, feelings, emotions, experiences, images, shades of sensations) are mixed. That’s exactly what this album is about. About the changes. Transformations. Creation and destruction. Rethought and meaningful. About the facets of love and hate. About inner dirt and cleansing. Pain and liberation.

Each piece, if you like, contains one or another emotion and feeling that changes throughout the composition. States are transformed into reality. In a micro moment of what is happening, perhaps not with you and me, but only in someone’s imagination. Or in general, a program with a looped playback algorithm that changes the listener’s perception timbre. Taking him into his nooks and crannies of memory and emotions. The endless search for yourself.
Myriad shades and textures gain freedom. Becoming seas of sound. At the intersection of the past and the future, there is always the present. You are at this point. Without the ability to save or re-download.

This album is my personal liberation. From the past to the present. Liberation from the past into the present. To possibly try to anticipate fragments of the future. Which, of course, is an empty idea. However, it makes sense, seemingly at will. But once you forget yourself again, you find yourself face to face with reality. Unsteady, transparent as glass. Fragile and unpredictable.
I thank the wonderful artist Yulia Shalygina for The eighteenth composition on the album — Front cover. Cover is certainly a complex and deep multifaceted composition.The cover, which undoubtedly reflects the essence of the album “States and Transformations”.
Listen. And be silent.
In the seas of sound, the weather is always hunting. Whatever that means to you. 

Sincerely, Ivan Kovalenko.

EXTENDED NOTES