Album Review: Your Need by Kedr Livanskiy

Reflecting an array of genres, Kedr Livanskiy has embraced all her new musical influences on her latest album, Your Need. The Moscow-based electronic artist shapes her sound by everything from soviet folk to '90s dance music. Recovering from her melancholic days, Livanskiy has re-evaluated her view of the world and looks to document the process of more joyous days through ethereal vocals and quivering synthesizers.   Punchy beats embellish every track, layered with graceful and feather-light vocals. "Sky Kisses" and "Kiska" are temperate ….

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Seeing Kedr Livanskiy live for the first time is jarring, a kinetic circus and luminescent melodrama that belies the lo-fi, sun-stroked mutedness of her January Sun EP and 2017 debut album Ariadne. Listening to those releases' wheezing drum machines and elegiac synths, not to mention her infinitely echoing vocals, evokes an eerily calming solitude, as if contentedly lost in a long-abandoned power station. Seeing these same songs performed live, brought to life as it were, is to have them illuminated, populating the power station with throngs of ravers and shards of spotlight.

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K edr Livanskiy is the pseudonym of Russian musician Yana Kedrina, a DJ, producer and singer whose shoegaze-y electronic music sounds as if it has arrived in a time capsule from a retro-futurist era. Singing in Russian and English, hopping between different dance genres, and coating everything with nostalgic tape hiss, Kedrina made an indelible impression with her debut EP, January Sun, in 2016. With her much darker debut album, Ariadna (2017), she (unlike the album's mythical near namesake) led the listener deeper into the labyrinth, combining foggy textures with synth melodies that seemed to spiral into themselves, and forlorn, wistful lyricism.

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