Vlad Dobrovolski - Non​-​deterministic Polynomial Poems (2019)

And the rosette for most beguiling title and sound of the week goes to Russian sound artist Vlad Dobrovolski and his ‘Non-deterministic Polynomial Poems’, hitting a poetic avant mark somewhere between Francesco Cavaliere, Robert Ashley and Nozomu Matsumoto.

Textured field recordings of water, aleatoric klangs and electronics meet traditional African vocals and percussion, Russian folk strings, numbers station-like bleeps and indecipherable vocals in the most fascinating and persistent intersections of style across all four pieces of Dobrovski’s latest opus.

We’re struggling to find concrete information on the artist, but that perhaps only ratchets the enigma of these recordings and their provenance. They occur with a dream-logic which, from experience, we understand doesn’t come quite so readily as on these recordings. Any more attempts to break it them down is both futile and possibly spoils the surprise, but suffice it to say we’re utterly captivated by these patchwork collages, and rate that many of you lovely oddballs will be, too.