Childese - Minor Eden (2022)

The music of St. Petersburg keyboard fantasist Vova Kolbin aka Childese fuses reverie and melancholy in a grainy mirage of tape hiss, field recordings, and cosmic church organ: welcome to Minor Eden. Inspired by a potently idyllic childhood summer spent in a dilapidated country house with his fisherman father many years ago, the album conjures a mood of longing and wonder, early mornings out on the lake, dawn light streaking the sky. Vova describes his process as a form of magical realism, at the threshold of new age and hypnagogia. This is devotional music in its truest sense, in thrall to times enshrined and things past, to golden ages and paradises lost, the hourglass of youth forever spilling softly in a dream half-remembered.