Vika Kuchak - Stels (2024)

Following up her streak of vibrant singles, rising star Vika Kuchak brings us her debut album "Stels". Having spent her teenage years in Magnitogorsk, Ural, the local gloomy geography has had a profound effect on her music.

The unique sensibility of the artist’s tape-fi house and leftfield pop is now materialised into one hour of deep beauty that provides welcome confirmation to her hidden talents. Opening things up with the moody Nocow and DJ Designer collaboration “На танцполе (On the dancefloor)”, Kuchak sets the tone for the rest of the album with its elegiac, sensual atmosphere. Each track's internal ambience has the paradoxical effect of creating an euphoric, emotional centre via a melancholic meandering of sound, smudging her soundscape into a swirling bliss of hauntological house music.

There's certainly intimacy and nostalgia; “Stels” is dedicated to childhood flashbacks full of anarchic, loose, and sometimes traumatised moments. Kuchak on “Stels” melted her sonic introspection into the joyous memoradelia, spinning the ghosts of low-brow dance music favourites of her pre-adolescent age with the recent high-concept drone and ambient obsessions. In her hands, sound reinterpretations of cultural and personal memories become portals to perceiving emotionally resonant dancefloor rhythms and gentleness of avant pop music.

"Stels. There's no agenda here. It's about missing the chaotic, free, sometimes violent space of childhood. The flickering episodes when it was good and the music that was playing at that moment. Basically, nothing new. Plus - the desire that there was music similar to the bastard child of Dr. Alban or Faithless and Biosphere mixed with the notorious low-fi house.
But in the end, it turned out the way it did. I don't know what I was thinking..."