Andrey Mishchenko - Children Of The Earth

Hear The Track Here

As the brighter sparks among you may have already gathered, Andrey Mischenko is a Russian musician. What you do not realise, maybe because you just plain don't care, is that he also proving to be an amazingly difficult musician to pin down or pigeonhole. Come on, you guys know me of old, you know I am going to try to fit labels to everything I see, it's a fine Gilmore Tradition. When I first heard September 29 (Window to the Fall) (May 2010) I automatically assumed he was a trained classical musician. Result? Egg on face. I think I've miscalculated on every other occasion too, yet now I tremble before a new - and previously undreamed of - dilemma. Children Of The Earth is yet another side to Andrey, this time it's....electronic dance??

Electronic Dance??? wtf??

I came to terms with his classical, prog-rock and various other offshoots but never would have I said he might come up with (dare I say it?) a dance track. OK, you sigh wearily, what's your beef with dance tracks then and I'll tell ya. Dance tracks are for dancing not for sitting on your butt pounding little bits of plastic to dust under your fingertips. Mind you, looked at another way, all that four to the floor does get the ol' letters flowing as you can no doubt tell. Now while Children Of The Earth is indisputably dance (beats and sounds) the way it is put together shows Andrey's fingerprints everywhere, and it isn't what I would called dance, closer to experimental IMHO.

Still, whats in a label eh? Well, as I pointed out at the beginning it helps lazy buggers like me to make sense of what I hear. To be sure there is a Russian strain of electronic dance, but Andrey is a bit too much of a classicist to really get swayed by annoying (yet strangely compelling) sequences or sweeps that go on until tomorrow. So, in effect, you get two for the price of one; dance undertones and a traditional classical flourishing happening above it. All, to my ears anyway, very Russian but hey, that's just me. Only real bad quibble I had was that some of the sounds used sounded distinctly weak, but you do what you can do, I suppose.