CHIKISS

The enigmatic and expressive Chikiss breaks a three-year silence with Between Time and Laziness, a brand-new LP of dramatic and dreamlike synthpop perfectly suited to Hamburg's unfaltering Bureau B. Written in St. Petersburg, Berlin, and Athens, and co-produced by Finnish multi-instrumentalist Jaakko Eino Kalevi, the album renders the existential, psychological, and philosophical in song form. Exploring motivation and self-doubt, the long shadow of the Soviet Union, and collective empathy with a cinematic flair, Chikiss weighs darkness and light, landing on the side of hope in her most considered and polished vocal album to date.

Over the past two decades, Galina Ozeran, AKA Chikiss, has followed her own desire line through post-punk, minimal wave, experimental electronica, and live improvisation to build an impressive catalogue of emotive and innovative music. Taking an intuitive approach to her craft, Galina acts as a conduit for her own experiences and the turbulence of the world around her. After the shared pain of the pandemic, the harsh suppression of protests in her native Belarus, and the outbreak of war in Ukraine, she had to close herself off, pausing solo pursuits to work as a producer for others and providing support to those around her. Between Time and Laziness represents a rebirth.

"This was a chance for me to return to myself and finish what I had started, to find an outlet for accumulated emotions, and transform them into music and light."

Heading to Athens to reconnect with Jaakko Eino Kalevi at Teemu Takatalo's Mutual Sound Studios, Galina reconsidered, reshaped, and rerecorded tracks written at different periods in her life with a fresh focus before returning to Berlin to take on post-production alone. "These songs went through various metamorphoses, upheavals, and locations, gaining new meaning." It's perhaps unsurprising, then, that the resulting LP possesses a timeless quality. Though Galina makes a conscious effort to exclude any musical influences, the album is haunted by a history of electronic expression, and listeners will hear distant echoes of Soviet-era film scores, Lynchian disquiet, the Sheffield of both the late seventies and mid-nineties, and the kosmische most closely associated with Bureau B. These unintended phantoms are unavoidable when an artist works from a place of intuitive creativity, embracing the subconscious to allow the psyche to speak out in an inner voice informed by a life of musical discovery.

Chikiss sets a hypnagogic tone in the intro, presenting poet Sergey Danilov's discussion of laziness and time as a broadcast from another world, crackling with radio static interference. Armed with a slinky bassline and immersive synthwork, "Evil Sky" moves through melancholy and mystery to arrive at something expansive and uplifting, with Galina's sprechgesang evolving into passionate song as the chords swell and drums intensify. The artist pays homage to Mikael Tariverdiev's film scores and the existential poetry of Boris Podiko with the seductive noir fantasy of "DKN," before shifting into the moody synth-psych of "Nevesta," a slow-grooving, sci-fi trip with hints of prog and post-rock, which drifts further into deep space via a dubby reprise on the title track. On "Train Schedule," Chikiss fleshes out a fragment from Siberian programmers Arm Author into an optimistic anthem bathed in the haze of drum reverb and soft-focus synths, while "4:45" sees a return to dream logic. Inspired by the moment in REM sleep when the illusion feels most real, this electronic torch song embodies the loss of the (im)possible life at the moment you wake. Driven by an insistent sequencer, "Into The Void" began life as a tribute to the 60s songs romanticizing space flight but evolved into an exercise in cosmic cabaret escapism, complete with a melancholic solo whistled by Jaakko. Stretching across eleven immersive minutes, "Don't Be Afraid" fuses magical realism and cinematic krautfunk into a head-nodding and hopeful masterpiece suggesting that we can reach a better future together. The journey ends somewhere across the galaxy, where distant sirens and microtonal synth ragas dance "Forever" to a slow-motion disco beat.

Galina's return as a solo artist, and to song form, is rich with groove, meaning, and melody, marrying pop perfection with emotional depth. In her words:
"I think it's a beautiful album, full of evocative tunes and romance, mystery, and a little sadness."

— Patrick Ryder