Some artists require a certain measure of distance to thrive. That is the case with Ganna Bryzhata from Ukraine, also known as Bryozone. She is best known as the bassist for Chillera, a trio of dub aficionados who developed a softly psychedelic style of space rock in her adopted hometown of Odessa, a port city on the Black Sea. The three once considered moving to Kiev, but ultimately decided that life in the capital was not for them: “It’s great to come here for a while, to feel the active movement, but it absorbs the energy,” they told an interviewer in 2019. “You have to organize more to live there. We are still not able to bring order to this chaos”. You can hear that refusal to adapt to big-city rhythms in his instrumentals, where Afrobeat basslines and surf licks churn as merrily as the tide, caring about nothing more than keeping up with the breeze.
A similar sense of voluntary isolation characterizes Bryozone. Bryzhata’s solo music is a world away from Chillera’s, trading his warm bluesy riffs and wah-wah twang for ethereal loops and icy, atonal drones. But both projects share a timeless quality. Chillera’s records sound as if they’ve spent decades collecting rust in some beachside community thrift store; The Bryozone production may have been salvaged from the flooded basement of a mid-century tape music studio. Perhaps even more than Chillera, Bryozone is bubble music, promising an island journey into inner space.
Bryozone’s music has changed considerably since their first two EPs, the one from 2013. ACID FROG DAY and Ifrit. Where those records remained tied to familiar strains of lo-fi techno and ambient dub, eye of delirium, his debut LP, leaves that recognizable ground in the rearview mirror. Across 10 assorted tracks, Bryzhata explores a series of mysterious shape-shifting visions that feel conjured out of thin air, not so much the products of silicon and circuitry as the ghostly afterimages of lysergic dreams.
The rhythms of the sea dominate the opening tracks. “Smoothly Flow” channels tidal rhythms into a whirlwind of watery synths and foghorn drones – looping and looping, drenched in a thick, grainy paste of tape hiss. It is hauntingly and emotionally empty, equally conducive to beatific calm and deep melancholy. “Sub Nautica” combines a slow 4/4 pulse and muted dub bass with rippling waves of synth; the influence of dub, a music of ocean currents and cultural exchange, speaks, perhaps, of Odessa’s historical identity as a mercantile city. “Ghost Tribe” and “Liminal Tribe” spin hand percussion through eerie tape effects, turning pitter-pat rhythms into screeching bugs and alien soundscapes; they evoke the work of Jan Jelinek, Andrew Pekler, and Muscut record label boss Nikolaienko, who have similarly reexamined ancient ethnographic phonography through an experimental electroacoustic lens.
