Alex Tiuniaev is an electronic musician and producer based in Moscow, and his name will, I suspect, be new to most people, although I Knew Her is not his first release – OtterSong Records released his Artificial Symphony in 2006. The neo-classical orchestral sound of his music and its repetitive, minimalist structure bear some resemblance to the work of modern composers like Philip Glass, Michael Nyman, Steve Reich and Arvo Pärt, and with the exception of Reich, these influences are all acknowledged on Tiuniaev’s MySpace page. Incidentally, he also lists Radiohead, U2, Travis and Coldplay, but have no fear, gentle reader, his music sounds nothing like any of those bands!

I Knew Her consists of a single 40-minute composition, which is definitely a challenge to the impatient listener. For many people, this monolithic structure will be an  immediate deal-breaker, and releasing a single album length piece by a relatively unknown artist is a bold and risky move on the part of Cold Spring Records. Cold Spring, however, is a label noted for defying expectations and trying new things, which is no bad thing.

The piece opens quietly, with gentle tones slowly making their presence known on the outskirts of audibility. At this point, I Knew Her seems to be ambient music in the vein of Vangelis or Brian Eno, but gradually, a deep bowed string section introduces the central motif of the piece, a repeated phrase of four notes delivered as swelling chords, with a numinous backdrop of ambient atmospherics and a bright but distant trumpet adding to the steadily building swell of sound. The music takes around 14 minutes to reach its full intensity, with the addition of wordless choral voice samples, which unfurl majestically in crystalline, ethereal veils across the plangent orchestral strings. The bittersweet mood of heartfelt yearning thus evoked is gloriously intoxicating stuff. This is soundtrack music for the world-weary ruminations of the hero of an epic by Lord Byron or the protagonist of a Caspar David Friedrich painting, gazing out across mist-shrouded mountain peaks and forested valleys. This is music  for sublime and defining moments, the kind of music which should be the very last thing you hear before dying, and indeed the kind of music which can very easily be imagined accompanying the stately disappearance of a gleaming coffin through the flame-concealing curtains of a crematorium.

What is notably missing from I Knew Her, however, is any great sense of dynamic development. The piece doesn’t really go through distinct movements or progress through different themes – after the choir comes in, there is no real change in the mood, tempo, pitch or intensity of the piece. I Knew Her doesn’t really take you on a journey. Instead, it  delivers you to an ethereal realm where progression through time seems like a temporal irrelevance, and it keeps you there. This may well not suit all temperaments, depending on how well you like the feel of the one place it does take you to.

But this place is a pleasingly melancholy and elegiac one, with the mood of the piece being aptly reflected in the autumnal ochres and greys of the cover art and the album’s dedication to “those out there seeking love”. I Knew Her is recommended not only for lovers of neo-classical music, but also for admirers of the ‘Naturmystik’ bands associated with the German label Prophecy Productions, such as Tenhi, Subaudition and most particularly Empyrium, since Alex Tiuniaev’s work quite clearly derives from the same 19th-century Romantic tradition that also suffuses the work of these bands, although the music that they produce is quite distinct from his.

www.alextiuniaev.com

www.myspace.com/alextiuniaev

www.coldspring.co.uk

www.myspace.com/coldspring