Dmitry Krylov - After All (LP)

Dmitry Krylov is a musician and sound artist. His latest project, entitled After All, is centred around apocalyptic poetics of electronic music and offers a spectacular meditation on the end of time. The album's dramatic structure demonstrates a gradual transition from the spacious oscillations of bowed instruments to plasmatic noise rhythms, which dissolve in an area of uncertainty and its revealing sonic imagery.

Based in Samara, Krylov interprets the ambient genre as primarily music of grief and sorrow. Over the past few years, he has produced a number of ambient albums characterised by sustained textures and grainy field recordings that capture various planes of human sentiment; After All is the final release in a series of albums that examine personal and universal sadness. The first album, Right Moment Will Never Come (2022), explores the unbearable grief of losing a family member through Stars-of-the-Lid-like utmost sensibility and downtempo composure, verging on sonic sharpness of ambient dub. Last year's Untitled (2023), mostly nocturnal and haunting project, yet at times decisively fast-paced, exhibits the lasting affective imprint of Russia's disastrous invasion of Ukraine. Embracing different tragedies — from the individual to the universal one — Krylov maintains a consistently authorial vision in his music, characterised by the evocative prevalence of the composer's thinking, despite the relevance of electroacoustic experiments for his work.

The final instalment in Krylov's “trilogy of catastrophes”, After All invokes the motif of apocalypse, universal purifying destruction. Having addressed the past and the present, Krylov turns his attention to the coming time and the promise of change. A substantial proportion of the album is made up of smooth vibratory canvases created by the bowed instruments, urban noises and liminal synths; now and then breaking into a crescendo, they are more akin to lamenting voices that can be barely controlled by ones who perform the labour of mourning. The power of lament appears to be enchanting only to reach its terrifying climax in the composition But Death is Not the End, where pain and devastation pour out in energetic torrents of power noise. Still the lament not only celebrates the bygone, but also prepares it for the afterlife. The remaining faith in the possibility of starting over is traced in the elegiac sequence of compositions, the looped structure of which is asserted by the eponymous final track. After All manifests: the essence of destruction only seems to exclude the prospect of tranquillity; a new beginning hides ultimately within it.