Résiste! | Paysages fragmentés by Katya Shirshkova | Yurii Kuznetsov, released 03 April 2026
- Katya Shirshkova - Résiste!
- Yurii Kuznetsov - Paysages fragmentés
"Katya Shirshkova and Yurii Kuznetsov are two Russian artists who have been living in France since 2022. Katya works with the voice as an acoustic phenomenon. She composes in a hybrid style, using her singing to create a surging chorus. Yurii, for his part, collects and assembles recordings and seeks to convey a certain physicality of these fragments of memory, drawing as much on the percussiveness of noise as on the pointillism of musique concrète.
For Résiste!, Katya Shirshkova works with vocal materials, paying particular attention to the subtle tonal differences and the beats that emerge between the voices she records. The vibrations of her voice also resonate with a sheet of aluminum foil. The material responds to the singer’s stimuli. The aluminum bends, filters frequencies, and saturates the speech to its very core. The word “Résiste!”, which is clearly heard for the first time in the first third of the piece, clashes with the metal. Throughout the piece, the Russian singer strives to make the words malleable through sound.
In Paysages fragmentés, Yurii Kuznetsov constructs a reconstructed territory and subtly reveals the spectres of human activity. The tape recorder captures the jolts of an uneven gait; shutters creak and converse with the illusion of a brass instrument in the immense solitude of a stifling reverb. The piece is punctuated by the poem پرنده گك؟ (Little birds?) written by the Afghan poet Layla Sarahat Rushani — and performed by Shirshkova — who expresses concern that artistic sensibilities are being silenced as conflict erases the culture and the bodies that give it life.
These two pieces serve as a clear testament to the tangible impact of commitment. Making one’s voice heard, carrying it forward with determination, and overcoming the obstacles that litter our path reveals a source of immeasurable hope. In the final segment of Résiste!, this essential rallying cry is supported by multiple voices harmonizing in polyphony, like the milestones of emerging worlds and desirable possibilities, to borrow Jérôme Baschet’s phrase."
- excerpt from the label coordinator's perspective
