I've spent a lot of time looking at the clouds lately. For most of the last six weeks in New Zealand - like a lot of places around the world - we've been in a pretty rigorous national lockdown. As part of this, with the exception of essential services, plane flights basically stopped. After a couple of weeks, the sky and the clouds started looking very different.
With "DOMA", her new spontaneous release on Parisian label Antinote, Moscow-based electronic music producer, DJ, and vocalist Oma (Olga Maksimova) has come the closest to capturing what I imagine it would feel like to bounce around the sky in those soft white clouds, high above the realms of human concerns. Fashioned out of airy, spoken incantations and equally ethereal or empyrean (but intricately detailed textures) electronic textures, "DOMA"'s ten songs - in their own unique ways - all blossom into richly realised, hyper expressive soundworlds born from the ambient/fourth world/meditative new age constellation of musical traditions.
Here's a short statement she sent Antinote with the release: “DOMA” in Russian means “at home”. For the last two months, my home has been a small city close to the Atlantic Ocean named Saint-Gilles-Croix-De-Vie. I am there, luckily, surrounded by so many soundscapes: new birds, different noises of waves, thunderstorms, and hundreds of seagulls. I'm spending so much time observing seagulls’ life here, how they are making nests on our roof, flying against the wind, catching fish on the waves. I was recording flute with open windows so you can hear all those Atlantic noises. First track it’s a flute singing to seagulls, then seagulls to midi and midi to flute chain. Some of the tracks sound like soundscapes or cycles which you can loop. It’s like a daily routine of moments that I have started to appreciate more and more during this lockdown, finding surprises inside myself without a mirror".
You can purchase "DOMA" in digital format through Antinote (here)