Kirill Mazhai is a young ambient composer based in Minsk, Belarus. His new album, You Don’t Belong, offers up seven tracks of melancholic minimalism, meditations on different places from his life, and the conflict he feels between leaving and staying, repetition and change.
So often, soft, non-abrasive ambient music doesn’t acknowledge any thematic difficulty or contradiction, so it’s fascinating to listen to You Don’t Belong with the knowledge of what inspired it. In his own words, Mazhai puts it like this:
“You Don’t Belong was made between 2015 and 2017, which was a transition period for me. Some life stages ended, some relationships failed. All the tracks on the album are dedicated to several places from those times — a house by the lake, an apartment on the first floor, a park in the middle of the city – the places that have stuck with me for a long time and don’t let go.”
“The album was mostly a reminder to myself that when you feel attached to something, you need to keep going, to move forward, that you really don’t belong anywhere. It was a reminder that it’s never too late to move on.”
You Don’t Belong is out now through Amsterdam’s Shimmering Moods Records. The cassette is sold out, but you can still grab the beautifully-packaged CD at their Bandcamp.
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