Alexei Borisov

Alexei Borisov.
Outside of his native Russia, Alexei Borisov is probably best known as a live performer with a sound and visual style that make his performances transcend the usual gig situation and resemble Beckett-style absurd theatre. Perhaps the most appropriate term for their soundtrack would be ”live collage”, often based on domestic or everyday material – ”found sounds” and home recordings of all sorts. They include field recordings of arbitrary soundscapes and conversations, mostly done diary-style with a cheap dictaphone, Borisov reciting his automatic writing-type lyrics, snippets of music from the radio, separate instrument tracks recorded for his other projects, solo playing on various instruments in a sleepwalking style or ”blindfolded”, as he has described his working (anti-)method with computers. The elements are mixed and cut up through effects in a manner which remotely resembles dj’ing with its sharp timing – Borisov’s long experience as a live dj can be felt – or a manual telephone operator turning his work at a switchboard into poetry, as David Keenan noted in The Wire magazine about his live album Before the Evroremont: ”The whole is rent with fuzzy, intercepted conversations that sound like archived wiretaps”.

(text by Anton Nikkila).

http://shum.info/borisov
https://www.facebook.com/alexei.borisov
https://vk.com/alborissov
https://vk.com/club2382713

Alexei Borisov, live quadro-performance @ FSG, 21.02.2015

Alexei Borisov & Anne Hämäläinen,
Before the Evroremont 2.0,
30 min, 2001/2019, live performance (qudro).