Special: Addicted/noname Label from Moscow, Part 17

The original German article is here.

Our Moscow friends are active again! There are five new releases on the Addicted Label: “Bibliotheca XXXX” by LibrёFnørd is supposed to be impro-metal, but is actually improvised jazz. With “Geo Murmuratio”, Starlit Tales serves up ambient relaxation music to literary travel stories. “Death Will Wait” by Zatvor is dark, gothic, epic, raw doom. The band Petyaev-Petyaev makes wild free jazz on “Absence”. Even wilder is “The Flavor of Fried Nails” by Pizzdolf EB, a project consisting of three bands — an acoustic blast of free jazz, noisecore, hip hop and pop right in your face.

LibrёFnørd — Bibliotheca XXXX (2025)

The four-person project LibrёFnørd improvises heavy metal. At least that's what they say. Listening to their debut album “Bibliotheca XXXX”, only agree to a limited extent - and instead refer to jazz. Or other art music, comparable to that of Diamanda Galás, for example, and not just as soon as the singer starts screaming like her. The title of the album refers to the recording location: this is a recording from the library of the Moscow Museum Of Modern Art. Improvising together is probably best done live.

Now, many metal styles require a certain sound density, and the project here rarely achieves this. So grooving, banging, riffing and rocking together is somewhat difficult when improvised. The opening track “Obscurum Per Obscurius. Introductio” still hints at such a track, but the next two tracks consist of experiments without rhythm, structure or melody; here the musicians and singers act completely freely, as if isolated from each other, artfully throwing crumbs and pieces into the room, which remain next to each other and disappear again. Only “Psyche In Scorpio. Casus No. ...” is to be understood as conventional music again, with a sluggish, intermittently increasing rhythm, a gnarling guitar, a whining synth and a preaching voice.

The centerpiece is “Chronicles of a Lost Planet”, which begins with glockenspiel and the now familiar experimental array of instruments, to which the singer offers a bewildering variety of vocal manifestations. Only after a while does a rhythm emerge, discreetly tapped, to which the other players group their instruments in a structured way, including an organ at times. You don't even notice that it's almost ten minutes long. “Astro Metal Inhale. Instructio” is actually breath, combined with undertone vocals and softly squeaking instruments from people who are already hoofing it, wondering when they can finally join in, and since the start signal is missing, they quietly and secretly cheat their way into the track and turn it into nightmarish, creepy anxiety music. The “Post Scriptum” begins as an ambient track with guitar feedback and vocal interplay, soon developing into a Krautrock beat.

The four participants are well-known colorful names in the Moscow improv scene; at least guitarist Anton Efimov has already been featured on KrautNick: He is part of the project Der Finger, but also a musician with Disen Gage, The Eggg and Unicellular Music, here with Damo Suzuki among many others. The expressive vocals come from Tatyana Izotova, who has also played with Disen Gage, the Insomnia Improvisers orchestra and other free jazz and Argentinian tango projects. The keyboards and occasional male vocal contributions come from Feodor Amirov, who has been known in the scene as a classical pianist and free jazz musician for over 20 years. The drums are played by Peter Ototsky, active elsewhere with groups such as Baritone Domination, Drumazhur, his Ototsky Quartet, Radost', Visokosnyi Jazz, Lenina Paket and others. Before this album, the quartet had only released the EP “Chagall 345”.

Jazz already dominates the biographies here. It is also far more present in this recording, alongside avant-garde and experimentation. But metal? Rather not. But anyone who becomes aware of the album through this label will have their spectrum broadened.

Starlit Tales — Geo Murmuratio (2025)

In a strange way, the Starlit Tales project manages to create a positive atmosphere. On their debut album “Geo Murmuratio”, you can hear a kind of ambient, but with beats and beautiful melodies that cannot be classified as pop, but are closer to ambient, relaxation music, dream journeys, and that's right in the middle of the topic.

Because drummer Viktor Tikhonov, otherwise with bands such as Detieti and Kshettra, generates soundtracks to books here in conjunction with double bassist Nikolay Samarin from IWKC and guest vocalist Arina Salevich, both of whom appear once each, i.e. quasi solo. Accordingly, these chilled, electronically dominated pieces of music, enriched with samples, carry a whiff of faraway places, sometimes sounding like a Far Eastern jungle (“Flocking Without End”), sometimes like Spanish flamenco generated by Warp musicians (“Albatross”) and otherwise simply like being on the road, not like setting off or arriving, but like the process of traveling, of discovery, of observation, of allowing the foreign place to take effect on you and become less foreign.

Tikhonov proceeds with caution, just as one should behave as a traveler in a foreign country. His sounds are powerful but not harsh, rhythmic but not over the top, even when he swaps his drums for IDM beats or lets them tumble down the stairs in a jazzy manner (“Whale Navigation”). The “Transparent Awakening” at the end features the voice of Arina Salevich, who enriches the head-nodding track with which Tikhonov brings the listener out of his books. Incidentally, he was inspired by authors such as Bernard Moitessier, Sir Christian Bonington and Ernest Shackleton.

Zatvor – Death Will Wait (2025)

"Смерть подождет" (Death Will Wait) — This title should give you an idea of what the music of the band Zatvor from Kursk is like. Here you get doom in its darkest form, three overlong songs long. “Хозяйка ритуальных услуг” (Mistress of the Ritual Services) opens with incredibly powerful drums, subliminal but brutal guitars and epic dark pads, accompanied by a wailing female voice. The four musicians keep up this dark plank about a “funeral companion” for twelve and a half minutes, followed by almost 15 minutes of “Охотник” (The Hunter), just as dark and doomy, but with more melodic vocals, initially with a Gothic feel. The band then lays harsher sounds over it, which roughen the music enormously and soon put it under tension in higher tones.

The band plays itself into a frenzy, free of conventions and structures, rolling out the tracks in front of the listener, generating atmospheres and moods, and paradoxically, this dark doom also makes you happy, that's how well done it is. In the title track, which lasts less than ten minutes, the musicians show off all their skills impressively once again. The piece begins as ambient, into which the instruments boom, the mood is worn and sobered, the vocals seem despondent, no longer even plaintive, and yet the music contains filigree, richness of detail, even stability in the midst of the dragging track. It builds up powerfully as it progresses, adding elements of post-rock and black metal and rounding off the unfortunately far too short album in a perfectly epic way. But better short and sweet than long and boring.

It is astonishing that the band has been around for almost 30 years, but that “Смерть подождет” is only Zatvor's second album. Founded in 1996, the band only released their debut “Ключ земли”, which consists of just one 50-minute track, in 2018. And only now have they released the follow-up. The band on this album consists of singer and keyboardist Katya Sumina, guitarist Denis Kolesnikov, bassist Anton Eremin and drummer Kirill Kiryukhin.

Petyaev-Petyaev — Absence (2025)

There can be no speech about “Отсутствие” (Absence) here: The two Petyaev brothers Peter, Pavel and their ensemble are so definitely present on this album. The absence here is singer Оксана Тарунтаева, who can otherwise be heard on other albums by this free jazz group, and the musicians used this circumstance to fill her place with their instruments by the time she's Absence. Accordingly, all kinds of wind instruments come to the fore here and play their hearts out as freely as the genre demands.

Jazz is, of course, a serious matter, but you can't help but accuse the ensemble here of having allowed themselves a few jokes. There are only three wind instrumentalists, but they are capable of unleashing pandemonium, creating chaos and making an official mess that sounds like the test department of an instrument factory. They don't do this permanently, but decidedly, and otherwise play in such a way that the five tracks on “Отсутствие” can clearly be classified as free jazz, i.e. free and close to improvisation, accompanied by piano or synth, guitar and bass to a drum kit that stoically keeps time, giving the tracks - except for the fourth - a fixed form and thus providing orientation for the listener. And generally gives the music a comprehensibility that makes the freedom all the more enjoyable.

Such humorous passages, which remind me of Horns Of Dilemma, can be found at the beginning of the opener “Расплескалось” (Splashed), and in the middle of “Два изгиба” (Two Curves), in which the saxophones chatter like waterfowl on a pond. In the twelve-minute middle section “Убить баронессу” (Kill the Baroness) everyone goes so crazy and generates a gigantic chaos that you can't help but laugh out loud. And this chaos runs through the entire album, with the musicians repeatedly turning up the heat, getting into a real mess and yet always finding enough restraint to never become completely inaudible. Although “Я за авангард болею” (I’m Cheering for the Avant-garde), for example, lives up to its title with stress music. For the concluding title track, the musicians return to rhythmically grounded free jazz.

In addition to the two eponymous brothers, Peter Petyaev on saxophone and Pavel Petyaev on guitar, the band includes the following artists: Ivan Bashilov on bass and guitar, Piotr Talalai on drums, Victor Konovalov on clarinet and trumpet, Maxim Bezhenov on second saxophone and Slava Burlakov on keyboards. “Отсутствие” is the eighth album since the band was founded in 2016.

Pizzdolf EB — The Flavor of Fried Nails (2025)

This is brutal. “Вкус жареных гвоздей” (), begins with extremely speedy free jazz. This is structured noise, which the ensemble unleashes here with “Ребята, меня взломали!” (Guys, I Got Hacked!), with saxophones circling around each other to hyper-fast drums and unleashed roaring. Straight in the face. The project takes this brutality and brute force straight into the next track “Айболит” (Aybolit) and only comes to rest halfway through the thirteen-minute song, when only some vinyl scratching can be heard to the friendly drums, but don't worry, the monster will roar again.

Pizzdolf EB is the name of this gathering of members of three bands, who are pushing their names together here: Pissdeads are a noisecore band, Rudolf (Рудольф) make experimental post-hardcore with hip hop and IWKC (in brackets EBB) are now almost pop, even more experimental. In other words, a combination that one would never have thought could exist. But it does exist and it produces shenanigans that oscillate between saxophone noisecore à la Monno and unsettling contemplation. Something seems to be driving people here to look for an outlet to let off steam.

Time and again, the ensemble builds absurdities into the walls of noise. There are always scratches, the middle section of the eighteen-minute “Крабе и шмеле” (Crab and Bumblebee) even has something of hip hop - and at the end, very briefly, reggae. In “Колдун-аутист” (Autistic Warlock) there are deep growls like something out of a horror radio play and speed metal in scratchy free jazz. “Da Flava” is chilled reggae with obscure explosions, such as a trumpet solo. The “Moscow Undead Club” is a swing tormented by similar means that would do credit to a Foetus. The quasi-title track “Жареные гвозди” (Fried Nails) and the bouncer “Карнавал” (Carnival) are back to the now familiar noise outbursts.

That's a whopping 82 minutes of noise, spread over just eight tracks and only occasionally interrupted, but garnished with dizzying detail. You can hear from the hustle and bustle that the musicians must have been in a great mood to shout out these shenanigans. And they are also taking it on tour with the Gazelle Of Death, a famous “rock wagon” there. Crazy!