Diego by Mårble

Fourth world fusion voyager Anton Glebov’s latest full-length of chimeric environmental music, Diego, emerged from field recordings he conducted on a recent trek through Georgia: gurgling waters of Narzan springs in the Caucasus Mountains, serenading frogs late at night by a lake in Batumi, crickets and cicadas hissing in the fields. Returning home to St. Petersburg he layered them with meditations and melodies using balafon, flute, percussion, saxophone, and synths to create surreal, shape-shifting habitats. Though Mårble began in Siberia the project has always been rootless, a mercurial melting pot of scrambled electronics, tribalist rhythm, prismatic jazz, and ethnographic ambience, evoking illusions more than identities.

Glebov speaks of his music inducing “transcendental ideas and infinity,” hinted at in the lofty alien hymnals “Upanishad” and “Болото Релаксации” (Russian for “The Swamp Of Relaxation”). Elsewhere Glebov’s message is more garbled and miasmic, in keeping with the dizzying hybridity which could well serve as his artist’s statement: “Not belonging to any musical style creates an atmosphere of freedom, disengagement, and levity.”