The long-awaited new Theodor Bastard album Volch’ya Yagoda is a major work the band has been working on for the past five years. Theodor Bastard albums aren’t released very often, but they invariably attract increased attention of audiophiles and music critics.
The multilayered and unpredictable album Volch’ya Yagoda inherits the band’s recognizable multigenre approach where psychedelic trip hop combines with cinematic instrumentals and archaic world music meets modern technological electronics. Theodor Bastard combine Russian texts with glossolalia and shamanic spells as easily as they change instruments on stage. Yana Veva and Fedor Svoloch compose music not only within the band, they regularly record soundtracks for popular computer games. Over many years they have sharpened the art of weaving complex sound canvases where the listener feels like in a labyrinth.
From album to album Theodor Bastard carefully and masterly combine many different exotic and traditional instruments.
Volch’ya Yagoda is no exception. The special northern atmosphere of the album is created with Nordic nyckelharpa and jouhikko, primeval flutes created from tree roots and shamanic percussion. And as always, the leading role in the album belongs to the voice of Yana Veva, exciting and bewitching by its deepness.
Volch’ya Yagoda takes the listener to the cold and twilight realms of marshy swamps of taiga and mossy tundra, to unexplored places where the earthly plane and the spiritual world are separated only by a very thin ghostly veil. For over twenty years Theodor Bastard have been known for their amazingly serious attitude to the world beyond that very frontier.
Theodor Bastard and NMR (photo: Alexander Corv4)
