Experimenting with different technologies and sounds, Edward Sol creates unique sonic journeys using reel tape, vintage analog synth's, cassette loops and more. Sol's unique and deeply personal piece is based around events taking place in post-Soviet Ukraine in the 90's. Beginning his journey with music making pop and performing in high school bands, Sol eventually graduated onto a love for more experimental sounds in University with such genres and bands as musique concrete, Stockhausen, industrial, COIL which led to an obsession for recording with primitive technologies.
In 2001 he established his first indie-label Quasi Pop with the aim to publish obscure and little-known Ukrainian albums. Beyond that he's released over 30 CD, Vinyl and Cassetter works across labels such as Glistening Examples, Banned Production, Chocolate Monk, Beartown, Sangoplazmo, Sentimental production as well as his own Quasi Pop label. On top of having a lot of unreleased and yet to come material, Sol also recently started reworking his old pop recordings into what he anticipates will be his first "pop album".
Edward Sol shared some details about the exclusive soundtrack he's created for Ears Have Ears, read below.
"Not unlike my previous works, the concept of this piece is simple though deeply personal. The whole story is about this series of strange purchases that happened many years ago. Mid 90s’ Kyiv, hard & depressive years just after the crush of the USSR. A friend of mine was always keen on fancy clothes, famous brands (mostly US) that were hard to buy, over-priced or just unavailable in early post Soviet Ukraine. Once or twice he took me to this weird place – it was dark, cold, barely-lit secret warehouse, I guess half-legal, full of massive dusty boxes with smuggled, discounted, often out-of-fashion jeans, shirts and jackets. Some of the things were really ugly and weird, overpriced. A few finds (after a couple of hours hunting) can be really nice and rather cheap, so we bought them. The whole process was full of digging tons of stuff, monitoring, conspiracy, hunting-tremor close to obsession. We were young, poor and creative. I still can recall almost everything single piece we bought there, many of those I have already heavily worn-out these days. The spiritual and sad side of the story is the early and tragic death of my friend in 2006. Comparing to old shabby clothes we bought together, the friend of mine passed away in his 30-ies and today he’still much younger than me. When I came across that old stuff the same thought comes again and again: “I’m getting older with my things, really older but he isn’t”. So it’s all about the material getting older and the eternal youth of the soul."
For further listening: https://soundcloud.com/glistening-labs/edward-sol-birds-of-the-sunrise-prism
