Artist Spotlight: Muhmood
Out of cold Russian Siberia Muhmood was formed as an experimental music project by Alexei Biryukoff. Mixing together visual influences from dark nature and abandoned civilization into sound bridging the dark ambient, drone, doom metal, experimental and noise.
Muhmood music is inspired by the foggy mornings in the forests and swamps, by the blasts of the wind blowing heated sand in the deserts, by the sound of cranky engines in the factories and roaring electricity in the huge power lines. Sound is like emotion, it ranges from rage and sorrow to love and joy, i am not here to impress you with some concept or exquisite musical terms, i hardly know why i am doing this – i just follow my instincts and enjoy myself making this noise…
We have two releases of Muhmood available free for download at Enough Records.
Muhmood – Tamara and Demon [enrmp174] – Cinematic dark ambient soundtrack of the 3D cartoon created By Nikolay Aladinskiy and Petr Bobryshev – St. Petersburg, Russia.
Виктор Iванiв & Muhmood – Rùt [enrmp216] – An EP collaboration with Виктор Iванiв (Victor Ivaniv) a futurist poet. They met in November 2007 when Victor came to Barnaul with a presentation of his book “A Glass Man and the Green Record”. At that time they decided to try to do 2 or 3 tracks to see what would come out. By June 2009 the four tracks EP is done. They continue to work on a long playing album that will include Victor’s poems and prose.
Review: Adamned Age – Fragile
One outstanding feature about Adamned Age is that her brand of IDM/jazz/ambience has inspired both people I agree with and people I don’t. What I mean to say is, there is something transcendent about Hanne Adam’s musical project. And of all the many acts I have heard online, she is perhaps the most worthy of some kind of professional recognition.
“Fragile”, released on the excellent Camomille Netlabel, takes some familiar sounds and extends them nicely. Synth bells, glitchey sounds, washes, and other elements are familiar to fans of Adamned Age. But in this release, the composition sends the sounds into a spacier realm, where tension is manifested and released, and where swirls of sound relate magically to one another in ways that are pleasing to the ear. I often found myself, while listening, thinking, “Did THAT work? Yes, it DID!”.
Where some artists have resorted to cheap tricks or machismo, Hanne Adam contrinues to sketch her portrait in the world of music with painstaking detail. She is a worthy artist, and one who unites critics, until all or nearly all agree that she has achieved something noteworthy with her work. Listen or download now:
Enough Manifesto (Part 6)
‘To push into other audiences.’
Know your enemy
In the final part of the Enough Records Manifesto series I’m pushing into what, to some, is the most contentious point of them all – ‘to push into other audiences’. As a general rule this one should garner fairly obvious approval – no one, no matter how in love with the intricacies and eccentricities of tiny hobbyist corners would deny at least some desire to spread the word of good music to ever more people and on that level this part of the manifesto doesn’t bear up to much scrutiny. That said though there are arguments brewing around it, not because more people listening can ever be considered a bad thing but because the source of those new listeners can always draw a line between two major schools of thought within the free music movement.
On the one hand you have those who look at the scene and, finding it to be a very good one, want it to exist in isolation from the rest of the cultural world – not isolated from new input and influences but very definitely not attempting to usurp existing models, the most notable of which is the commercial mainstream. For those in this camp the main message seems to be that what we’re doing is good, undeniably so, so why frame it in any relation to the opposition? Why even call the mainstream model ‘opposition’ in the first place when their existence and ours are so obviously juxtaposed? Even if business led systems garner more listeners and more influence in most peoples cultural lives our mere presense as an alternative, albeit an understated one, proves that there are other ways and that, vastly succesful or not, those other ways are always valid in their isolation. It’s an approach which I can understand and it’s certainly the more comfortable option as far as most aspects of what we do goes; it allows us to negate the demands of competition and focus solely on the music without worrying about the wider context it takes within society. We don’t have to proselytize, promote or compare ourselves to the work being pumped out by those whose main motivation is profit and through that we don’t have to compromise an inch in search of wider acceptance. That most people beyond our still very insular world will never hear much of the music which we love is a side note, in time those who want to hear something new will, perhaps, come across it on their own or by the actions of a self-sustaining movement without our having to move into enemy territory to spread the word. And it’s a belief which will always hold sway within the movement because, as ever, no one ideology can dictate the progress of such an incredibly diverse community of musicians, listeners, writers and miscellanious others. But – and there’s always a but – there’s at least one other school of thought working away on the issue. And it’s the school that I belong to. Read more…
Enough Records 
