Thuyone “Existance” (2021)
The album “Existence” of the musical project “Thuyone” by the poet Ella Yevtushenko (by the way, the wife of the poet Bohdan-Oleg Horobchuk) is produced in the best traditions of European synth-pop of the 1980s, with one noticeable difference: if in the 1980s we only imagined (with a smile) the 2020s as a bizarre cluster of half-robots-half-humans made of polyethylene, now it has become our reality, because AI of our smartphones has long been half (and then — quite significant) of our consciousness, and going outside without a plastic mask on face today is life threatening and can cause sanctions from law enforcement. So this smile from the 1980s today looks like a distant retro, which is nice to miss, but we really forgot what made us laugh. It is this emotion that is felt while listening to the music of “Thuyone”.
The songs of “Existence” are not whimsically harmonious, you will not find a long and unexpected sequence of chords, which, in fact, is typical of synth-pop in general, but there is a cold and detached, devoid of emotion, female vocal, which gives the impression of not a living person. thus polyethylene gynoid. Accompanied by synthetic sounds made by Ableton Push 2 USB controller (64 dynamic pedals, 11 touch encoders, touch tape controller, two pedal inputs, color LCD display), this performance quite organically conveys the loneliness and claustrophobia of lockdown and subsequent digitalization of the future, where the rain from the song “Rain” will look at best as a high-performance 3D simulation with additional wetting with sterilized water and ozone inside a special antiviral rain capsule.
An indisputable plus of “Thuyone” is that this music breaks out of the monotonous trend of “gopca-dritsa-konopeletchky-pseudo-turbo-folk”, which drove a stupid heavy roller on our pop music, turning it into a fake simulacrum. Of course, it’s nice to believe that cyborgs are in love with Ukrainian folk music, and soon all the iron dogs of Boston Dynamics will dance exclusively to the hopak, but the reality is somewhat different from these fantasies.
