Response Pliskin
Ability II Corrupt

Interplay by YlangYlangCatherine Debard has been active as YlangYlang since 2012, a creative staple in the Montreal music community. She’s worked frequently as a collaborator, but continues developing her unique interstitial solo recordings through a variety of labels and performance experiments. Inspired in part by the writing of Danish poet Inger Christensen, in Debard’s words Interplay explores “how we are shaped and shaping our experience at the same time” and “how free we can be within our own limitations.”Full of deceptive contradictions and some of Debard’s most mature orchestration, she describes it as the final instalment in a trilogy focused on relationships. After albums focused on the external world, this time she turns her attention more intensely on “the self.” It’s a fitting meditation, reflecting on how we adapt and survive as individuals in dark times. Interplay’s warming combination of synths, field recordings, and backing instrumentation weave together toward balance. Here the mixture of stern and soft, dark and light, is seamless.

Back in 2021, when Volodymyr Gnatenko agreed to work on his debut album, none of us could have predicted it would be released, post-pandemic, against the backdrop of war. At the time, the 23-year-old producer from Lutsk was riding high on a string of well-received 12s for labels such as Where We Met and Animals On Psychedelics, besides local Ukraine labels such as LSS557 and Rhythm Buro. He was, between covid closures, playing live at Kyiv clubs such as Closer and Kureni, looking to tour in Europe, and spending every spare second making music.How things change. When missiles began to rain on Kyiv, Gnatenko, alongside a few friends from Closer, hid in his studio. For a while, the bombings did not stop. But for the producer, neither did the music-making. Choosing to stay in the city, he continues to make beats, managing only to mix down between bombing raids. He changed his first name to match that of his president, ditching the previous spelling of his name because it was the same as the aggressor, “[the same as] my worst enemy, I am ashamed and disgusted that I started my career with it”. The album speaks of softer, easier times. A combination of rich ambience, and laidback breaks alongside loose progressive and trance-fused dancefloor tracks, this debut brings together all the strands that Gnatenko plays with. The process, he says, was exhausting and long. Yet the results are lighter, fresher. Maybe because, he says, “it is dedicated to my future wife. All the tracks are my words of love for her". Deeply hypnotic and freely moving between ideas, it feels like it was made a lifetime ago, not a matter of months. Now, it resonates with a new defiance. It is a debut with an extra layer of meaning.

Spatium by Aguma

These Tasty Records warmly welcome an exciting group of producers for their third eclectic piece of wax!