You’ve probably heard Galya Bisengalieva play the violin on some of the most cherished albums in your collection, like oh I dunno ... “Moon Shaped Pool” by Radiohead or “Blond” by Frank Ocean. Her second soon-to-achieve-cult-status album “Polygon” is a concept album about the Soviet Empire’s use of her home country of Kazakhstan as a nuclear test site. 

From the press release: 

"Though it created more nuclear fallout than Chernobyl, the story of the Semipalatinsk Test Site located on the steppe in north east Kazakhstan (known as The Polygon) is little known internationally. It was the Soviet Union’s primary testing zone for nuclear weapons and they conducted 456 nuclear tests there from 1949 to 1989, with the vast landscape providing anonymity and isolation. Each track on the LP is named after features within The Polygon; villages, towns, natural features and other landmarks. To Soviet leaders it was “uninhabited” but in fact the steppe was the crucible of Kazakh culture, home to poets, musicians and the country's most famous literary figure Abai Quananbaiuly, not to mention an extraordinary ecology of mountains, hills and pine forests running along the river Irtysh.” 

“Balapan” starts out as a deceptively sweet violin piece, but soon descends and expands into atonal and electronic territory, manipulating the instrument towards industrial bleeps and rhythms. It’s gripping, deep and worthy of a permanent slot on your playlist(s).

Visualiser by Aditi Srivastava

From “Polygon”, out September 2023.