Kedr Livanskiy

Kedr Livanskiy, whose name translates from Russian as Lebanese Cedar, serves as the artistic identity of Moscow native Yana Kedrina. As a vocalist and beatmaker she crafts electronic pop that draws heavily from the textures of 1990s techno and jungle. Her first widely circulated recordings, among them the 2016 EP January Sun, carried a stark, glacial atmosphere that mirrored the climate around her yet still conveyed an undercurrent of yearning optimism. The follow-up album Your Need, issued in 2019, retained that spectral character while shifting toward a livelier and more propulsive energy. Liminal Soul, released two years later, revisited some of those earlier sonic qualities but added acoustic instrumentation and introduced one of her earliest tracks sung in English.

Kedrina entered the world in 1990, twelve months prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union. She began her musical path in punk before discovering electronic production during her university years. Encounters with the work of Inga Copeland, Laurel Halo, and Florian Kupfer prompted her and several peers to establish the Johns’ Kingdom label and collective, which rapidly emerged as a central hub for Moscow’s underground electronic scene. After uploading several pieces to SoundCloud she secured a deal with the New Jersey imprint 2MR, founded by Mike Simonetti—who had previously launched Troubleman Unlimited and Italians Do It Better—and Mike Sniper of Captured Tracks. The single “Sgoraet” surfaced near the end of 2015, and January Sun followed in the first months of 2016. Her first long-player, Ariadna, appeared in September 2017; its compact-disc version bundled the complete January Sun recordings. The second album, Your Need, arrived in 2019 and presented a brighter fusion of dub and deep-house elements. Liminal Soul, issued in 2021, took on a more shadowy and introspective tone and included contributions from Flaty and Synecdoche Montauk.