HYBRID STATE

The Moscow band Disen Gage entered a new phase of musical evolution with this year 2017 oddity, credited to the group in name but in truth more of a side-project by guitarist Konstantin Mochalov, joined here by Anton Efimov and Daria Solovyeva. Two of them are part-time musicians; all three are scientists at the Laboratory of Nano-Bioengineering Physics, a branch of the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute (MEPhi).

The band now describes itself as a "musician association with a flexible participants crew". And the first recorded effort by the reduced ensemble is closer to R&D than to actual rock music, sounding very much like an extended improvisation by The Pink Floyd, circa 1967: drifting, untethered electric guitar drones, with Mochalov playing the (relatively) conventional notes and Efimov acting as the Interstellar Overdrive noisemaker.

In other words, the new album is a startling departure from the Eclectic Prog of previous Disen Gage albums. Initial listens didn't leave a strong impression: with little actual music to latch onto, the album can seem a trifle self-indulgent, and not in a good way. But subsequent replays are proving me wrong. These sinister ambient dioramas, so far removed from anyone's comfort zone (not least the nominal band itself) are like anti-matter twins of a Robert Fripp soundscape installation, trading the often symphonic beauty of the Crimson King's solo guitar mantras for a darker, more claustrophobic Russian aesthetic.

The album is divided into nine discrete tracks. But it's really a single, sustained performance, improvised by the guitar duo in the Moscow science lab where Ms. Solovyeva was at the same time calibrating "a novel design of a scanning probe microscope integrated with an ultramicrotome for serial block-face nanotomography" (quoting one of the academic papers about her research, and no: I don't understand a word of it either).

I only hope the MEPhi laboratory directors didn't catch them in the act. From the documentary evidence, accessible directly from the album's bar-code 'cover art', Mochalov and Efimov might be accused of goofing around with their electric guitars while Solovyeva did all the actual science. The experimental procedure, whatever its nanotomographic aims, looks very esoteric, and the soundtrack to the event is even more so. Despite the album's abbreviated length (barely 33-minutes), it can present a challenge to unwary listeners. But shouldn't that be the goal of all so-called progressive music?