In addition to my solo
projects and work in the media industry, I occasionally take part in
collaborations, research labs, and independent creative initiatives.
These projects don’t quite fit into traditional formats like albums, films, or
games — and they often exist outside the scope of my core artistic work.
That’s why I’ve given them their own space here. This section brings together works at the crossroads of art, history, music, and experimentation — vibrant, unconventional, and sometimes unexpected.
There will be a lot of text here, so if you like longreads - welcome!
Sounds Of Stone
An experimental piece created within the framework of the Sound Lab for the festival “Vladimir – The White-Stone Capital” (2025).
Ilya Chertkov – concept, sound recording, composition, preparation of sounds
Liza Ludwerg – vocals
Artem Cernei – production, curation
Ekaterina Manasova – author of the photo used for the artwork
I live in the ancient and beautiful city of Vladimir, renowned for its white-stone cathedrals. The problem for most of us who live here - including myself to some extent - is that we tend to take all of this for granted. Fortunately, there are people among us who see things differently. One of them is Artem Cernei, who, after years of effort, finally found the right arguments and the right way to present the value of white stone as the city’s brand. This year, with the support of the Administration, he was at last able to organize the White Stone Festival here in Vladimir.
The festival lasted for a whole month, during which ten sculptors from different regions - and even from abroad - created their works from the local white stone. These sculptures have now been handed over to the city.
At Artem’s invitation, we were fortunate to become part of this Festival.
I’ve already spoken about some of my past collaborative projects: the Exhibition of Noise Machines in Suzdal and Tula, and 1000 Seconds for Suzdal’s millennium — all of these stories can be read about in detail below.
My constant collaborator in these projects has been Ilya Chertkov, and this time we were also joined by Liza Ludwerg. Together, we created a Sound Lab for the Festival.
The essence of this project was to encapsulate the sonic dimension of the Festival and present it in a form accessible to the listener.
But our team went a step further than simply walking around the Festival’s opening with recorders, capturing ambient sounds — we were interested in letting the city itself speak, in helping it find its own voice, to show how it could sing.
At the start of developing the concept, we had several rather fragmented ideas, which we eventually managed to bring together into a single whole:
Idea #1: The White-Stone Choir – Record the voices of festival visitors, asking them in an organized way to sing specific sounds; create a sound library for musicians; compose a piece using this choir.
Idea #2: Lithophones – As part of the festival, build a stone musical instrument and perform a composition on it. Create a sample pack, record the performance.
Idea #3: The Music of the Festival – Capture sounds characteristic of the festival (birds, stone, people). Compose a piece inspired by the monumentality of stone.
Idea #4: (Object)ive Minimalism — The Music of Stone – Use real stone as the starting point of a composition, exploring all the sounds it can produce.
Idea #5: The Foundation of the Composition – Map the locations of the city’s cathedrals onto a musical staff. A connection across time: a contemporary compositional method with a historical foundation.
In the end, we couldn’t settle on just one idea — all of them blended into a single mix:
1 – We recorded the voices of festival visitors. They weren’t singing, but their voices became the textural foundation of the piece. The sound library, however (Impulse Responses), we created inside the cathedrals.
2 – We recorded every possible sound of stone and of the sculptors at work — some of which turned out to be tonal. This partially gave life to the lithophone idea. Mostly these sounds were used as rhythm, though even this rhythm carried tonal qualities within the composition.
3 – We captured the general soundscape of the festival and the park where it took place — these, too, became part of the textural layer. And indeed, the final composition was very much inspired by the monumentality of stone.
4 – The idea of (Object)ive Minimalism was used only indirectly.
5 – But the idea of building the composition on the map of the cathedrals, with a musical staff laid over it, was taken in its entirety.
In the process, Ilya and I intuitively agreed that the Golden Gate, serving as the starting point of the composition, would embody the note G.
On the one hand, it lies fairly close to the middle of the musical staff (with our “notes” spread out on both sides of this central point), while at the same time it sounds a bit less tense and pronounced than B, which is the actual center of the staff.
From there, I drew a musical staff across the map of the cathedrals, and they aligned themselves into a melody.
When we listened to it, we realized it sounded exactly as it should — the city had begun to “sing.”
At that stage, we still didn’t know how the final piece would ultimately sound (which fit perfectly with the experimental nature of the music, and we were completely fine with that).
But we did have a clear starting point in the form of a melody — one that we recorded inside the cathedrals themselves, with each church contributing a single note, sung by Liza Ludwerg.
The recording took place over two days, during which we covered the following churches:
Assumption Cathedral
St. Demetrius’ Cathedral
Church of the Intercession on the Nerl
Spasskaya Church
St. George’s Church
Knyaginin Monastery
Cathedral of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary
A separate and symbolic starting point on the map can be considered the Church of the Deposition of the Robe, located within the Golden Gate. Unfortunately, we couldn’t access it, as the Golden Gate is currently under restoration.
Next, Ilya sorted and prepared these recordings, and together with Liza, we held several long sessions in my studio to shape the final form of the piece.
In the end, the melody — starting from the Golden Gate — travels all the way to the Church of the Intercession on the Nerl and back, accompanied by the sounds of sculptors at work and the festival itself, culminating in an epic ending that celebrates the monumentality of Vladimir’s white stone.
At the core of the piece lies a synthesis of two traditions: Russian folk music and mid-20th-century classical experimental music.
Our goal was not only to capture the sounds characteristic of the festival, but also to interact with the city itself, its architecture, and its history.
In Russian music, vocal works historically rely on text, but no authentic text suitable for building a composition was available.
We therefore reached a compromise: the vocals were recorded inside Vladimir’s white-stone cathedrals, but they were based not on text, but on the location of the churches in the historic part of the city, as well as the acoustic properties of these structures.
The percussive rhythms and noise textures you hear in the piece are the sounds of white-stone being worked on by sculptors from various CIS countries during the festival.
These were recorded with a portable recorder, piezo pickups, and a geophone (special thanks to the sponsor of the geophone — the architectural bureau "Kollektiv").
The form of the composition was suggested by the city itself: while developing the concept, Ilya Chertkov and I noted that the white-stone buildings — whether still standing or formerly existing — when mapped onto a musical staff over the city, formed a melody.
With the support of the Vladimir Diocese and the Vladimir-Suzdal Museum-Reserve, the corresponding notes were recorded in these churches and performed by the singer Liza Ludwerg.
The composition unfolds from the Golden Gate of Vladimir to the Church of the Intercession on the Nerl and back (each church contributes a single note, played several times, sometimes in multiple octaves).
The melody remains intact, but appears in various iterations, partially or fully, in direct and reversed order, with varying rhythms.
The piece consists of several conceptual sections, each drawing the listener’s attention to different aspects of the whole: the sounds of stone and the festival; the slow melodic movement toward the Church of the Intercession; improvisational vocalizations styled on Russian folk singing; and a striking coda symbolizing the monumentality and grandeur of the city’s white-stone churches.
