CREATIVE PROJECTS

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.

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.

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.

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.

A performance-meeting dedicated to the experimental musical legacy of the Russian Futurists.
1000 seconds of music in honor of the 1000th anniversary of Suzdal.

Line-up:

Sergey Cheremisinov – piano, electronics, composition
Ilya Chertkov – lecture, electronics
Nikita Lozhkin – DIY instrument performance
Danila Loginov – field recordings on tape, analog electronics

Additional participants:

Elena Lezova – project curator
Nikita Nikitin – sound engineer and assistant

In 2024, the ancient Russian town of Suzdal — located about 35 kilometers from the regional capital where I live — celebrated its 1000th anniversary.

Known for its striking medieval landscapes, little Suzdal is home to nearly a hundred churches and monasteries and boasts far more hotels than the nearby city of Vladimir.

To mark the millennium, our team came together at the MIRA Center to create a musical piece dedicated to the city’s jubilee.

The project took the form of a creative laboratory and lasted a full week, not counting the extensive preparation beforehand.

MIRA is a cultural center in Suzdal that includes a concert hall, a library, an exhibition complex, an artist residency, and a recording studio.
Since we were going to work closely together over the coming week, our first step was to move into the residency and settle in.

We stayed in Suzdal for several days. Occasionally, someone would travel back and forth to Vladimir for work.
One of those days, I recorded a drone in my studio in Vladimir — it later became the foundation over which the main composition evolved.

We arrived on Tuesday, April 23, 2024. In the afternoon, a partial team (without Danila) headed to the residency, did some grocery shopping, and began preparing for the rest of the group to arrive.
Later that night, Danila and ornithologist Yulia Buyanova joined us. Yulia is the secretary of the regional branch of the Russian Bird Conservation Union, and we had intentionally invited her to collaborate on the project.

The working logic was as follows:

We would record the voices of Suzdal’s spring birds, translate the motifs of their songs into piano phrases within a specific key, and record them on the local Steinway & Sons grand piano.

At the same time, we divided responsibilities:

Nikita Nikitin, Nikita Lozhkin, and I recorded instrumental parts using a wide array of microphones;
I also worked in my Vladimir studio to create the compositional backbone of the piece;
Nikita Nikitin and I handled the editing and mixing at the MIRA Center’s studio — we reviewed and selected the best takes, and ran some of them through the natural reverb of a local underground chamber, which also functions as an exhibition space;
Danila Loginov processed the field recordings, built tape loops, and prepared for a performance using cassette players;
Nikita Lozhkin prepared a live-looping performance using handmade instruments: rehearsing with different types of percussion, ocarinas, and more.

Our goal was to fit the entire piece into exactly 1000 seconds — 16 minutes and 40 seconds.

Each run-through varied slightly, but we kept close to that mark.
The conceptual core was rooted in the legacy of the Russian Futurists, reinterpreted through contemporary methods:

Blurring the boundary between "conventional music" and the music of nature;
Realizing ideas the Russian Futurists never had the chance to fully bring to life: computer-assisted composition, artistic noise as a legitimate musical element, sound recording as a compositional tool, live processing of pre-recorded material, aleatoric music as a compositional technique, and more;
Embracing modern technical methods and fusing them to generate musical material: live-looping, real-time processing of pre-recorded audio, and aleatoric (random-based) techniques of composition.

Some elements were later discarded — but the core concept stayed intact.

About a month or two before the event, we began meeting at my studio to brainstorm ideas, sketch out plans, and assign responsibilities.
Some of those meetings were completely unproductive — while others turned into full-blown creative storm sessions.

Initially, Ilya suggested a deep dive into the intersection of two traditions: Russian folk music and Russian noise art. He even bought a stack of books on the subject, and Elena helped connect us with a few specialists in the history of ancient Rus.

But the more we dug into it, the more the concept started to fall apart. The harder it became to figure out how to actually execute it, and how to present it in a coherent way.
So, after a few weeks of grappling with it, we scrapped the original direction and pivoted hard — toward what eventually became 1000 Seconds.

To be honest, we never quite managed to clearly explain to our ornithologist what exactly we were after.
Our initial vision was pretty straightforward: a specialist would tell us the best spot to hear birds, point to a specific tree, name the species, and we’d get clean, labeled recordings.

In reality, though, by 5 AM we were sleep-deprived and groggy, and the whole process naturally shifted into improvisation.
The ornithologist suggested locations, we wandered around recording whatever we could find, and then later we’d listen back — not really trying to identify the species, but just memorizing melodic patterns and attempting to reproduce them on the piano.

Our first destination was Ilyinsky Meadow — a state-protected nature reserve right in the heart of Suzdal, nestled in the floodplain on the right bank of the Kamenka River (on the opposite side stands the Suzdal Kremlin).

Willow warblers, black-headed gulls, reed buntings, yellow wagtails — all of them merged into a wild avian cacophony. Danila would later run these recordings off magnetic tape during our live performance.

After the meadow, we tried one of Suzdal’s city parks, but didn’t capture anything useful there. So we headed out in the general direction of the city of Ivanovo, hoping to find a deeper, more remote forest to record in.
We began at a cemetery just outside Suzdal, then moved on to a more promising spot: a fishery called Neptun, near the Latyrevsky Pond.

That area had a real forest, and the forest had chaffinches, tree pipits, starlings, chiffchaffs, nuthatches, blackbirds, and great spotted woodpeckers — the last of which were the most fun to imitate on the piano.

We split into two teams: Danila and I in one, Nikita and Ilya with ornithologist Yulia in the other.

This turned out to be our most fruitful recording session.

Somewhere on the way back, two things became clear:

There was no way we’d make it through the rest of the day without some sleep;
It didn’t really make sense to isolate individual birds in the recordings — the material was more effective as a whole.

We felt a bit sorry for Yulia — she genuinely wanted to be helpful, but soon realized her presence wasn’t exactly essential to the workflow. That said, I’m personally glad we had the chance to work with her: she showed us some incredible places and shared a lot of fascinating insights about birds.

Back in Suzdal, Ilya began sorting through the recordings and preparing them to send to Yulia.
I, meanwhile, returned to my studio in Vladimir to start working on the ambient foundation for our performance.

It’s something most people probably overlook, but the MIRA Center in Suzdal houses a Steinway & Sons grand piano from 1875.
Once we found that out, recording the instrument quickly became a cornerstone of the entire lab.

So, on Thursday, April 25th, from 3 to 7 PM, our full team locked ourselves in the MIRA Center’s main hall to record.

That’s when Nikita Nikitin joined the project. At the time, he was the in-house sound engineer at the venue, which meant he had full access to the studio’s impressive microphone collection.

We figured — just in case — we should capture absolutely everything. Before long, the piano was surrounded from all angles by recording gear.

Meanwhile, Danila was prepping his setup. He’d started the night before — cleaning and selecting magnetic tape, adjusting his recorders and transferring sounds from one cassette to another.

Nikita Lozhkin and I sat down at the piano and began "imitating birdsong" — using motifs we had picked up in the field — while Nikita Nikitin captured everything and suggested a lot of ways to make the parts sound more organic and convincing.
Out of all of us, I think he took this whole idea more seriously than anyone.

One more unique feature of the MIRA Center in Suzdal is its underground space — a series of chambers with long, booming echoes.
They're usually used for temporary exhibitions; in fact, it was in those very halls that we once performed a noise piece using Yuri Marin’s mechanical installations (there is an article about it below).

At the time of our residency, the space hosted a rather unusual religious-themed exhibit — complete with a beautifully rare pipe organ. We didn’t use the organ in the performance itself, but we did sample the hell out of it.

This time, we decided to use the underground hall as a natural reverb chamber.
We ran selected "bird-piano" patterns through it to give them a haunting, resonant depth.
While Ilya and Nikita Nikitin handled that process in the studio, I was off rehearsing my part, and Nikita Lozhkin and Danila Loginov locked themselves in the vocal room to work on their live sets.

After the studio work, we returned to the residency for final prep — the first full rehearsal was scheduled for that evening.
Ilya was finishing up his lecture, which was set to precede the performance.
Danila was frantically rebuilding part of his setup — something had stopped working, and the broken gear couldn’t be replaced quickly.
I was getting into the zone for a proper rehearsal session, and Nikita Lozhkin was assembling his live looping project in Ableton Live.

After rehearsal, we packed up and checked out of the residency — time for a well-earned break.

The performance was set for April 29th, during a long holiday weekend dedicated to Futurism and Dadaism. The festival was packed with lectures and meetings featuring some brilliant musicologists — Fyodor Safronov, Konstantin Dudakov-Kashuro, and others.

A few days later — on Monday — we returned to Suzdal with all our gear.
From 10 AM to 1 PM, we rehearsed nonstop, running through the piece several times.

By the afternoon, other festival events were already starting up, so we were politely kicked out to grab lunch and wander around town for a bit.
We reconvened for our final rehearsal at 5 PM.

After that, Ilya gave a lecture he had put together during the residency, written specifically for this event: "Russian Musical Futurism: Then and Now."

There was no official video recording, so we ended up stitching together concert footage from whatever clips we could gather.

Here’s how the roles broke down during the performance:

I played the piano part — a pre-composed piece, guided by a scrolling timeline on my laptop instead of a traditional score.
Nikita Nikitin ran sound, recorded the concert, and triggered the background track I had composed.
Danila Loginov handled the field recordings of birds — playing them off magnetic tape using cassette decks, live-processing them with a chain of effects pedals.
Ilya used Ableton Live to launch piano samples that mimicked birdsong, all previously re-recorded through the MIRA Center’s natural reverb, as well as through a huge chain of effects. He controlled the loops and processing in real time from a MIDI controller.
Nikita Lozhkin played an arsenal of shakers, whistles, ocarinas, and assorted noise-makers — sampling and processing them live.

You can watch the final performance below:

In 2020, a talented artist from Kaluga, Yuri Marin, got hold of some equipment from an abandoned furniture factory.
Reimagining these objects, he created a dozen hand-operated and automated machines designed with a single purpose: to make noise.
All kinds of noise — from rustling and scraping to droning, rumbling, and even screaming.

This led to the creation of The Noise Workshop, a sound installation that debuted in Kaluga as part of the Sound Games exhibition series, which explored diverse sonic phenomena.
The installation was featured at the contemporary art festival The Bridge.

Three years later, Marin’s noise machines made their way to the MIRA Center in Suzdal, where they caught the attention of my friend and longtime collaborator, Ilya Chertkov.
On August 12, 2023, the exhibition officially opened.

The event began with an introductory talk, led almost entirely by Pyotr Aidu — a widely respected pianist, avant-garde artist, and the visionary behind Sonic Landscapes.
Sitting beside him was Yuri Marin himself, unexpectedly modest but no less brilliant — the creator of the noise machines that sparked the entire event.
Together, they offered a brief overview of noise music, shared stories behind the machines’ history and restoration, exchanged jokes, and answered questions from the audience.

As soon as Ilya saw the machines in action, one question immediately came to his mind: If the machines are here, why not honor the spirit of the early avant-garde and compose a piece to be performed on them?
The speakers responded encouragingly — yes, it’s a great idea, though no one had gotten around to it yet.
So Ilya decided to take matters into his own hands. He spoke with Yuri and Pyotr after the talk, and they agreed to plan a performance for the fall.

That’s where I come in — as the composer — along with Danila Loginov and Nikita Lozhkin, who joined as performers.

The first manifesto of noise music was actually written in 1909 by Nikolai Kulbin — something that’s often forgotten today, as many mistakenly begin the timeline with Luigi Russolo, the Italian who penned his own (more detailed) noise manifesto in 1913.
In the early 20th century, our fellow Futurists made noise in every imaginable way: think of Arseny Avraamov and his Symphony of Sirens, or Dziga Vertov’s soundtrack for Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbas, among many others.
So it felt only natural to create a graphic score — just as they and many others did in the early and mid-20th century — and to perform this piece in the ancient city of Suzdal.

—Ilya Chertkov

“Games with Sound” is a series of exhibitions dedicated to the many phenomena of sound.
Each installment is a point in space, marking one facet of a complex, multidimensional body — an imagined world of acoustic vibrations.

Sound is a perfectly physical and material phenomenon.
And yet, due to the peculiarities of our perception, it becomes something almost intangible.
Sound is like a ghost or a phantom: invisible, slipping easily through walls, vanishing without a trace.
Perhaps that’s why it's so tempting to imagine sound as a physical object — to try to capture it, possess it, play with it.
Maybe that's why the phrase “sound exhibition” feels inherently dissonant, even paradoxical — it sounds like an oxymoron.

The idea of exhibiting sound as a material object isn’t that old.

A pivotal moment in this history was Luigi Russolo’s manifesto The Art of Noises, and the broader activities of early 20th-century Futurists and Avant-gardists.
It was then that artists began to lay claim to sound as a medium for creative work — a right that had previously belonged almost exclusively to musicians.
Throughout the 20th century and into today, the territory of sound has continued to fragment and evolve.
There is now a vast world of sonic practices that are not music in the traditional sense.

Games with Sound is dedicated to exploring those borderlands.
It’s driven by a desire to investigate, collect, and classify this colorful diversity — all of it nonetheless made from the same fundamental substance.
That impulse led me to the idea of a “curated series” devoted entirely to sound.
I can’t imagine a better form to present these “acoustic organisms” — with the joy of an entomologist discovering a new species of beetle, but without the heavy-handed intervention of a composer.

— Pyotr Aidu

In the end, we compiled a sample library that’s now available for free access — you’ll find the link at the end of this article.
I also used these samples to create the intro to our performance and composed a separate two-minute track as a memento for the MIRA Center.
The main piece itself runs just over 20 minutes.

As we were mapping out the structure of the composition, we arrived at the following plan:

The performance would take place across two adjoining halls. However, playing in both simultaneously turned out to be less effective musically than dividing the piece into two parts — one performed in the first hall, the other in the second.
Each hall housed four noise machines, which meant that each performer would work with two machines throughout the entire piece.
Some of the machines were automated and could be triggered via a large, vintage control panel located in the first hall — so we made it a point to incorporate this feature alongside manual performance.
We needed a sonic backdrop to glue the entire composition together, as well as a kind of “metronome” to help us follow the score and stay in sync.

Speaking of the score — this was one of the most fascinating aspects of the entire project. Here it is:

This is a graphic score.
Its development — and the composition of the section later performed on the sound machines — was led by Ilya Chertkov.
He proposed the following system: each symbol in the score — a circle, triangle, square, diamond, or cross — corresponds to a different level of intensity or dynamic.
The way the symbol is drawn — whether it’s hollow, outlined, or filled in — represents the method of sound extraction.

It may sound a bit convoluted at first, but after just one run-through, everything clicked into place for us.

As for performance tools, we used metal brushes, drumsticks with both hard and soft tips, and bows.

And also — my scream.

We begin the performance in the first hall, build up to the most intense, noisy section, leave the automatic machines running, and then move into the second hall to finish the piece there.

Throughout the entire performance, our “fifth and secret” participant — Nikita Nikitin — acted primarily as a gifted and attentive sound engineer.
But also he performed the score’s “metronome” part: a steady two-minute cycle that defined the structure of the composition and, in many ways, served as the only tonal element in the whole piece.

The result was a complete work for five performers, two rooms, and eight noise machines — twenty minutes of controlled chaos.

On October 21, 2023, we premiered the piece in the town of Suzdal, at MIRA Center.

Hi there!

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.

Sounds Of Stone

1000 Seconds

Day 1. Preparation

Day 2. Birds

Day 3. The Piano Recording

Day 4. The MIRA Center Studio

Day 5. The Concert

Noise and Silence