Unstern – Es Geht Der Tag album, track by track

Ambient exploration meets piano grandeur head on

Unstern is a new collaborative effort between deep ambient artist Arzat Skia and prodigal pianist Leo Svirsky.  They’re mysterious alright – so much so that when we requested a press photo, we were politely turned down and asked whether the logo below might work instead?

They’ve just released their debut album, Es Geht Der Tag, featuring lush electronics, two pianos refracting across the stereo field, processed recordings from the Peruvian Amazon, bowed percussion by Greg Stuart alongside strings and renaissance meantone organ recorded at Orgelpark in Amsterdam.

Co-mixed by Swedish electronic music luminary Civilistjävel! and Arzat Skia and mastered to tape by Stefan Betke aka Pole, it’s described as “a deep mental journey, rich in subtle transcendental tendencies and psychic liberation”. We’d only add that’s it’s really good to chill out to as well.

The vinyl pressing of Es Geht Der Tag is expected on July 5 – so the pair have put their heads together to talk us through the five tracks in fully immersive detail.

1. All The Kingdoms Of The World In A Moment Of Time

The project began in summer 2020, I was studying Bach’s Art of the Fugue, a piece where one theme is permuted and stretched, played simultaneously in three different tempi, in multiple rotations. Arzat Skia had just started and had some material that didn’t fit the project.

He sent me the backbone of one of these unused tracks, a synth part that was eerily close to what I was working on, exactly the kind of sound I was searching for but couldn’t quite find. Over the course of a month I recorded several takes of piano, closely studying the harmonies. My process began with a kind of wall of sound where the piano parts were so dense, the attack disappears and becomes another kind of long tone, to a gradual thinning out, so that different temporal layers and cycles emerge in counterpoint to the synths, but also to each other. This approach to duration is largely indebted to the work of Morton Feldman, where time is always hovering, floating, and fluctuating, allowing the superimposition of various elements operating on different temporal registers, never restrained by conventional meter. The title refers to Christ’s vision of Satan in the wilderness, where the devil takes him to a high mountain and shows him “all the kingdoms of the world at a moment of time” (Luke 4:5) A simultaneous perception of time passing in multiple distinct and irregular cycles, collapsed into an infinite now.

2. Of Fire And The Many-Eyed Wheels
 “And as the fire rose up, soaring higher,
I saw under the fire a throne [made] of fire and the many-eyed Wheels”

(Apoc. Ab. 18:3).47

This track also began with the synthesizer parts. Processed field recordings gathered during my stay in the Peruvian Amazon weave in and out, wrapping themselves around the stereo field. We set out to imbue the piece with a sense of breath. Nearly every iteration of the bassline is slightly altered via expansion, contraction, and fine-drawn dynamic variation. Some layers move at accelerated speeds, while others, such as the main synthesizer melody, take the entire length of the composition to unfold.  A rapid fire, muted kick drum slowly crescendos through the song’s pinnacle, giving a faint pulse to the swarm, a pulse that was always already there.

If Morton Feldman’s concept of “crippled symmetry” was essential to the first track, on this track we were more indebted to the temporal thinking of Gerard Grisey, whose music reflects the overlapping ways in which beings experience time, ie the time scales of insects versus whales, geological time, cosmological time…. The piano parts are inspired by the descending lines in Jurg Frey’s Pianist Alone (2), and also Arvo Part’s concept of Tintinnabuli, where instruments function akin to the ringing of bells.

Civilistjävel!’s co-production was especially crucial to this one. We all worked tirelessly, mangling the synthesizer patches, generated from a single short sample of a flute taken from a Salvatore Scarrino piece, via seemingly endless chains of cheap, artifact ridden pitch shifters, distortion units and inexpensive old, grainy digital reverbs, full of character and forgotten by time.

3. Malign Star

“And as he walked by my side, I began to scan the sky for a certain star I thought I knew, as if it had some influence over my fate. Having located it, I continued on my way, following the streets where I could see it ahead of me, forging onwards, as it were, towards my destiny and wanting to keep the star in view until the moment death was to strike.” Gerard de Nerval

The tracks on the B side began with the pianos. Malign Star is a completely unedited first take. The idea was to stretch the harmonies into more extended, sweeping melodic lines, longer orbits and trajectories. 

The main organ-like patch was constructed from a sample of Leo’s accordion playing. Given that none of the piano parts were metered, composing the electronics required individually placing midi notes, to the millisecond, and then sending them out to various old samplers, synthesizers, and fx processors. Throughout, the string harmonies are subtly offset by a self-generating patch made on an old Korg MS-20 that sounds like a half-broken machine faintly sputtering out in the distance.

The strings were composed and recorded at my home in rural Tennessee, an homage to the pastoral landscape, recorded by an incredibly patient session musician who was conducted through measures whose lengths are never quite the same. The ever-shifting meter stands in a perpetual tension with the music’s firm tonal and melodic grounding, avoiding obvious signifiers and never falling into pure abstraction.

4. In The Roar Of Your Channels

The foundation of this track was a long-form, guided improvisation recorded in Amsterdam’s Orgelpark on the Van Straten organ, a replica of a 1492 organ in meantone tuning, together with violin and double bass. The harmonies are based on a time-stretched version of the synthesizer parts of “Malign Star.”

Two different performances of this were superimposed and then passed through a series of barely functioning early 90’s digital rack effects and ¼ inch reel to reel, then whittled down,  looped and spliced together with additional synths and samples, as originally, many of the individual chords were sounded for minutes at a time. Much of my work as Arzat Skia involves manipulating acoustic instruments to sound like synthesized sounds, and synthesizing sounds to sound like natural phenomena, so it becomes unclear which is which, reflecting the increasingly blurred distinctions between the digital and “organic” in our world. 

5. Es Geht de Tag zur Neige

The piano part for this comes from “Warnung” a late song by Robert Schumann composed in the aftermath of 1848. The song is addressed to a small forest bird, warning it that its song will alert its predator, the owl: a warning for the waiting century. It begins with a repeating descending motif, somewhat like the falling motif in track 2. 

North Carolina based percussionist, Greg Stuart, played the piano tracks back through gongs, using them as transducers while also bowing them. Aside from the kick drum, synth bass and piano, every sound was generated via filtering, pitch shifting, processing and reharmonizing fragments of Greg’s bowed percussion performance. This transformed material swirls around the lurching 58 bpm pulse, with elements rising and falling into foreground and background. We wrote the bassline together in Tennessee, which entailed some incredibly challenging rhythmic programming to lock in and out of the strictly metered kick drum and the non-metered piano parts, which were recorded long before we landed on the idea of grounding the track, and closing out the album, with a simple four on the floor kick pattern, which itself begins to feel irregular due to its surroundings.

Pre-order your copy of the album, out on July 5, by clicking here