Olga Nosova and Alexei Borisov started to play as the duo ASTMA in Spring of 2009. Dom session was their first professional recording experience, organized quite spontaneously at the legendary Dom, the concert venue for experi- mental and improvised music in moscow. Anton Nikkilä (long term collaborator of Alexei Borisov) had just arrived from Helsinki to perform at Noise and Fury festival curated by Borisov in moscow, so the three teamed up to record the DOM SESSIONS. All tracks are the result of improvisations, recorded on eight tracks, without any additional overdubbing or editing.
About ASTMA (Russia/Germany):
The duo with Olga Nosova (drummer and vocalist mostly known for her work with Moscow fusion band “Syncopated Silence” and post-punk band “Motherfathers”) is one of the latest projects of veteran of Russian industrial/electronic/ free improv scene Alexei Borisov and noticeably very fast-developing - their mind-boggling and powerful music is already highly acclaimed among the music lovers not only in Russia, but around the world!
The collaborative project was formed in April 2009 in Moscow. Paying homage to both experimental tradition of Alexei’s countless musical reincarnations and Olga’s instrumental experience, the duo embrace elements of weird free-form spoken word psychedelia, live electronics, minimalism, free jazz, noise, heavy acid, electro-acoustic, dub and far too many different types of acoustic torture to even bother mentioning all of them! The music is highly impro- vised, so naturally Borisov / Nosova is collaborating with various musicians, video-artists, dancers, performers and poets from different countries, both in live situations and in studio environment: Anton Nikkila (Finland), Dave Phil- lips (Switzerland), Matthieu Werchowski (France), Frantz Loriot (France), Thomas Buckner (USA), Tom Smith (USA), Jandek (USA), Anton Mobin (France), A_Spirale (Italy), Marcus Beuter (Germany), Edgars Rubenis (Latvia), Sergei Letov (Russia), Korhan Erel (Turkey), Oleg Kornev (Russia/France), VTOL (Russia), Mitya Fedotenko (France), Ales- sandro Bosetti (Italy), John Hegre (Norway), Pekka Airaksinen (Finland), Els Vandeweyer (Belgium), Yuri Yaremchuk (Ukraine), Mia Zabelka (Austria), Aras Seyhan (Austria/Turkey), IOIOI (Italy), Ilpo Vaisanen (Finland), Quentin Rollet (France) to name just a few.
Borisov / Nosova duo is touring extensively and taking part at different international festivals, exhibitions and show- cases. In 2009-2014 they performed in Russia, Turkey, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Poland, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Netherlands, France, Israel, Lithuania, Ukraine, Belorussia, USA, Italy, Czech Republic, Hong Kong, China, Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, England, Sweden, Spain, Belgium....
International events and festivals: Spektro Fest (Istanbul, Turkey 2009), Jauna Muzika (Vilnius, Lithuania 2010), Sonic Circuits (Washington DC, USA 2010), Interpretations (NYC, USA 2010), Sonic Protest (Paris 2011), Altera 2011 (Italy), The Morning Line (Vienna 2011), Moozak fest. (Vienna 2011), The 4th Moscow Biennale (2011), Ljubljana noisefest 2012 (Slovenia), Fano Free Folk Festival (Denmark 2012), Klanghaus fest (Austria 2013), Monofest 2013 (Ukraine), Aani Festival in Kuopio (Finland 2013), Avant Art Fest in Wroclaw (Poland 20103), MEM Festival in Bilbao (Spain 2013), FIMAV 2014 (Victoriaville, Canada) etc.
Showcases and lectures at Berkley Music Collage (Boston), George Washington University (Washington DC), OCT gallery (Shenzhen), Fine Arts Academy (Vienna), Sibelius Academy (Helsinki).
About Anton Nikkilä:
Anton Nikkilä (born 1965) is an experimental musician and composer who lives and works in Helsinki. He started mak- ing music in the ”post-punk” milieu of the early 80’s, ran the cassette label Valtavat Ihmesilmälasit Records in 1980–82 and attended John Cage’s summer courses in Finland in 1983. Later during the 1980’s he was actively involved in Russian underground rock as a translator (which subsequently became his official profession) and in many other roles, including journalist and festival organiser (to which he returned later when working as the director of Avanto Helsinki Media Art Festival in 2003–2005). In the early 90’s he studied Russian literature and musicology and became father of two children.
Anton Nikkilä’s first solo album ”Formalist” was released by Moscow’s Exotica label in 1998. In 2000 he started the N&B Research Digest label with Alexei Borisov, his musical collaborator since the mid-90’s. Their duo, based on Nikkilä’s compositions, Borisov’s texts and improvised noise by both, has produced two studio albums and two live albums.
”You’ve never heard the cut-up and sample thing done with such absurdist, insane panache and vigour. (...) Some- how Anton knows exactly how to control all of his elements – distortion, programming, unpredictable electronic ef- fects – into a perfect, constantly mutating chimera of sounds that cannot possibly exist. It’s like seeing the Tatlin tower remade out of breadcrumbs and plasticine, spinning around at the top of a mountain. Despite their atomised approach to de-constructing the song form (and the dance music form, to some extent), this intelligent duo still manage to ask many pointed and searching questions about the geo-political state of the world today.”
(Ed Pinsent about Borisov & Nikkilä’s ”Live at Belly”, The Sound Projector 17, November 2008)
”Since the early 1990’s, the Russian Alexei Borisov and the Finn Anton Nikkilä have been engaging in a cross-cultural dialogue invigorated rather than encumbered by the complex and conflicted political relationship of their native coun- tries. Their conclusions have mostly been published by their own N&B Research Digest imprint. Nikkilä states that three ideas lie behind the label’s mock-institutional facade and plainspeak notes: conceptualism, experimentalism and archival work.” (Matthew Wuethrich, The Wire, July 2008)
“Experimental music is not dependent on institutional definitions; it constitutes a field, albeit fragmentary, of its own - a no man’s land. The electro-acoustic music of Anton Nikkilä, for example, a musician with an avant-punk background, neatly defies all conventional definitions. His minimalist industrial dada is equally at home in clubs and in concert halls reserved for classical music.”
(Tanja Uimonen, Finnish Music Quarterly 3/2007)
Skyler Skjelset of Fleet Foxes goes experimental on this full-length, which combines elements of drone and minimalism with indie rock. Bandcamp New & Notable Sep 6, 2020
