As much as I try to find the right words to describe the intention behind this album, I repeatedly come to a dead end. It is as if I go for a walk in a deep forest: one part of me wants to get lost in the unknown territory, while the other lingers on the familiar. By trying to make meaning of the world around me, I search for compositions that reflect something eternal, irresistible to change and corruption. Reið means this journey, and the feeling that one world dies somewhere, and a new one emerges with every blink of my eyes.

For over ten years, Shalygin has been occupied with a project for a lifetime: music for solo instruments, since the most concealed, intimate and deep things can only be expressed by a single instrument. One musician on the stage, who plays not just for the audience, but more for himself, akin to a person praying. In each of his solo works, Shalygin reaches an exalted state, giving the instrument a special voice.

Each season of the year brings with it a feeling of nostalgia and separation. Fasle Deltangi is something that comes back every year and overtake us with these feelings. With this music, we try to bring forth these emotions.

Music can minister to minds diseased, pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain, and with its sweet oblivious antidote, cleanse the full bosom of all perilous stuff that weighs upon the heart.

Music strives to produce a poetic vision of the universe, with its language that doesn’t need to be translated in order to be understood. It is able to push away the borders between cultures and traditions, and reveal how everything is interconnected, though expressed in different languages and forms. Just as life originates in its absence, and sounds have their source in silence, so do utmost passion and despair wither into serenity. These ideas stream through this album and culminate in Red Velvet.

Music can minister to minds diseased, pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain, and with its sweet oblivious antidote, cleanse the full bosom of all perilous stuff that weighs upon the heart.

History always creates an imprint on the composers’ output. However, apart from a possible historical link between Schnittke, Vasks and Pärt one might imagine, I felt something more than that. In these three pieces, I felt a sense of timelessness and an urge for an ultimate truth, to be explored through a juxtaposition of extreme emotions, and found in the musical representation of silence.