Bleep

Galya Bisengalieva’s music often asks: what is the cost of technological advancement? Her first answer was 2020’s Aralkum, following the depletion of the Aral Sea in her native Kazakhstan. Her second is Polygon, depicting the areas within the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site. Bisengalieva’s violin is tenderly bowed, yet split like atoms: dusty and desolate in ‘Alash-Kala’, soaring above bass rushes, while slicing plucks are thrown into a tailspin on ‘Chagan’. Pulsations like beating helicopter wings march through ‘Polygon’, amidst lurching harmonic shifts and wraithlike whispers, evolving into the curious technoid rhythms and hypnotising alarm tones of ‘Balapan’.