Kotra – The Discriminant of Consciousness [Prostir]

Kotra is the main solo project of Ukrainian artist Dmytro Fedorenko, to whom we must attribute an enormous contribution to the European experimental music with this and other major projects such as Variát, which is another recently created solo alias, and in which he performed live at Berghain on 24 May as part of the CTM Festival. His other musical offerings are Critikal, a trio he shares with Andrey Kiritchenko and Jeffrey Surak, and Cluster Lizard, a duo he forms with Kateryna Zavoloka, with whom he also runs Prostir, a label founded in 2018. In addition, Fedorenko is also the owner of Kvitnu, one of the great European experimental music labels founded in Kyiv in 2006, which unfortunately ceased to operate a couple of years ago.

The main idea behind Kotra‘s releases and live performances was about provoking his own and audiences perception limits, exploring the possibilities of music to affect body and mind at the most extreme conditions, and looking at experimental music as a practice of transformation. And Radness Methods opens a new chapter of Kotra’s ongoing excessive sonic research.

Writing of Radness Methods came up from the ancient ideas of ritual drum music and rhythmic meditation techniques, where a ritual sound performance appears as a series of abstract sonic actions, rather than musical events, provoking a journey to non-ordinary states and realities, drumming a way into silence.

By layering deafening sounds into the patterns of acoustic hyperventilation, Radness Methods initiates a flow of invoking contrasting conditions and offers an artistic method of extreme urban meditation, and a fierce sonic driver for the ultimate sledgehammer dance.

Radness Methods is a shamanic ritual for the sorcerers of concrete and asphalt, an ecstatic hymn for the philosopher warriors debating the power over life and death. Blazing anthem of excellence for the no one who is just anything.

Release date: April 7th, 2022.