One of my favorites so far on the post-Soviet, post-punk tip. It’s almost risen beyond that sub-genre with the integration of Turkish or Central Asian sounds. It makes it sound more contemporary but still anchored somewhere back in time. MORWAN, who from what’s available online is a one-man project from Kiev music veteran Alex Ashtaui, is pretty special. He’s been pretty busy with this over the last few years and apparently does everything out of a home studio.

The music might have to speak for itself today. This man has nothing at all to say and high-strung music and caffeine isn’t changing that. That’s okay. It doesn’t have to happen at will. It doesn’t have to happen every day, or every week even. It just has to happen every once in a while. There are other things to do. One of them may be to look into a trip to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet States. There is something happening there that tickles my curiosity, and something beyond post-war Brutalist architecture. It’s not the the classical and ancient have no appeal at all, but I’d venture to say that the cataclysmic events of the 20th Century shaped contemporary culture a hell of a lot more. The mainstream keeps looking back to centuries of old, and maybe they prefer to ignore the frightful visions of the Atomic Age and the Space Age. Ignoring what might be unpleasant or unsettling to examine has never been my way though.

Anyway…