Fedir Tkachov
An Extravagance of Crows
Bio: Fedir is a Ukrainian electronic music artist, aiming to and succeeding at creating ambient and neoclassical music that cuts to the bone. Having no traditional music education, he came to music making on his own terms, beginning with improvising on an old soviet cello as a teenager, and later jumping into the world of synthesizers and sound design.
Bandcamp: https://fedortkachev.bandcamp.com/
Statement: I approached “An Extravagance of Crows” from two opposite perspectives. The first, darker part of the soundtrack came to me through sheer musical experimentation, and could’ve been informed by my experience of living through wartime. I didn’t have a specific emotional concept at the time of making it, I simply chose to trust my creative intuition. You just enter the flow state, and flow in it, with it. Looking back on the music - that’s probably what being tied to the window by some illness or circumstance sounds like.
I used my newly bought fretless bass to play most of the parts. Both the opening pads and solo lines were created using an electromagnetic device called “Ebow”, which allows making a sound without plucking the strings. For the bass groove I’ve muted the strings with some rubber pads, which gave it a unique sound that I wasn’t able to replicate since then. One of my current main instruments - electric cello, was used for supportive, almost ghostly parts, but for the ending of the first movement I used the bass again with a cello bow.
For the second theme I took a slightly different road. It began with the word “Extravagance” - I wanted to connect to what that is, what it feels like. Perhaps for the first time in my life I started writing music with a chord progression, and the way it sounded immediately felt like an answer to those questions.
The whole sound of the second movement is much more openly electronic, as most of the parts were played on synthesizers, even if they often hint at strings or other acoustic instruments. Most notably, the leading lines were played on a music controller “Linnstrument”, which lets you perform synth parts with expression and movement, similar to playing a string instrument.
Joining the two themes was not an unchallenging process at first. At some point I thought it was impossible. Luckily, I asked for help from my cousin Danny, as well as some large language model, and a very gracious, simple solution was found - to use one part of the first composition as a bridge to the second. The contrast and the emotional tone of that felt really powerful to me - as if the fog has cleared, and you could appreciate the beauty of the world and life again.
I find it a bit ironic that me and Jim decided to connect the two tracks with the video in that order - the darker theme during the day, and the much more positive, bright music for the night time. It might hint to the fact that everything bad in life passes, one way or another. Or that there's always hope.