IMPLOSIONS

IMPLOSIONS is an instrumental concept album that deals with the themes of colonialism, war, exploitation, consumerism, capitalism, the anthropization of the world and its consequences.

An implosion is an explosion process that collapses on itself. It is a violent contradiction that characterizes our reality of apparent well-being when outside and inside its boundaries an ecological and humanitarian disaster is happening.

The title of the album summarizes the contradictions of the Western first world and the fragility of its current condition on a political, cultural, social and economic level.

The phenomenon of an implosion explains also what the album is on a sonic level. A combination of stylistic, timbral and conceptual contradictions: silence and sound, sonic explosions and emptiness; structure and deconstruction, regularity and chaos; composition and improvisation; atonality and melody.

IMPLOSIONS follows the path of Andreij Rublev's previous solo work but enriched by the presence of Camilla Collet (drums, percussions), Nicola Marsura (drums, percussions), Giorgio Giacobbi (tenor sax, live electronics), Ruben Rossi (tenor sax, live electronics). Different musical backgrounds, new sound elements and a more dominant performative approach.

Unpredictable electronic machines in feedback, Andreij Rublev's main research field, meet the performance of acoustic musicians. Everything is very loud, physical, energetic. It is a “sound as physical assault” (Connessioni remote 8/2024. Luigi Monteanni,https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/connessioniremote/issue/view/2593) which exploits the extreme intensity of the sound and its physical properties to describe the reality of late capitalism with its distortions. Noise and saturation have a value that transcends the metaphorical meaning and becomes both a description of reality and a physical opposition to this dystopia.

The songs, played completely live with an high degree of improvisation, are then saturated and partially rearrangend in the post-production phase to amplify these concepts but they also keep the “dirtiness” of a live performance. Another contradiction.

The last track of the album Ghost Track: Voices Where There Are No Voices is instead composed in collaboration with Bienoise (alias Alberto Ricca). Andreij and Bienoise exploit voice recognition and noise suppression AIs in a Google Meet call, feedbacking the audio signal to force the algorithms to work improperly and try to recognize voices in their own feedback data stream. It is an attempt by the AIs to recognize and represent themselves sonically. An open ending to this concept album that represents the future developments both for our sonic technologies and for the musical research of Andreij Rublev.

The artwork and visual design is curated by eeviac (https://eeviac.art/), an artist who deals with covers, posters and graphic for music since 1999 (for example he worked with: Iosonouncane, Xiu Xiu, Zu, Musica per Bambini, Trovarobato and many many others). The album sees two different physical releases: on double CD (including a full documentary on the recording session) and on SD card in a special cube package designed and printed by Francesco Gava and eeviac.

The recording session, which took place over three days in September 2024 in Tich Studios, was documented by the videomaker Paolo Pandin (second operator: Chiara Uliana). He produced a full video documentary about the album, published online together with the album release.

Paolo Pandin (https://www.paolopandin.com/) created a music videoclip for the track WW3 Escalation Process, shot in collaboration with ECC (European Culture Centre) in Venice (technical assistants: Margherita Maccari and Isabelle Moro). More than 30 international artists lent their works to be used in the video, shot in two locations in Venice (Palazzo Mora and Marinaressa Gardens) in November 2024 during the exhibition Personal Structures. Beyond Boundaries.