Solar X

Emerging from Russia’s post-Perestroika underground, Roman Belavkin, performing as Solar X, developed his own variety of layered low-tech electronic music. Early techno experiments relied on rudimentary analogue keyboards whose textures appealed simultaneously to listeners in the West and at home, encouraging local electronic efforts while attracting outside curiosity toward Russian work. A genuine polymath, Belavkin also trains in martial arts and studies cognitive science; his electronic investigations pursue the same questions that animate his academic research into structure, chaos, complexity, and their links to neural activity and feeling.

The Moscow native experimented with breakbeats while still in high school yet regarded music as mere pastime until a 1992 car crash kept him indoors for two years. His computer became a constant companion; unable to purchase synthesizers, he explored software and soundcards to generate samples drawn from the Soviet analogue instruments of his youth. Armed with training as a mathematician and theoretical physicist, he acquired music-technology skills through online exchanges with international peers devoted to analogue methods. Friends documented his debut album Outre X Mer, which reached the American label Defective Records in 1995—its founder having been one of Belavkin’s online mentors. The record stirred international techno listeners, yet provoked still greater response domestically once the Detroit-pressed copies circulated back into Moscow clubs. In an era when Russia possessed neither local scenes nor independent labels and techno arrived only from abroad, the achievement seemed scarcely credible. Subsequent years brought modest local renown; Belavkin honored Russian musical heritage by joining producer Artyom Troitskiy to reinterpret a song by Alla Pugachova. Seeking economical production, he launched his own imprint, ArT-TeK Records, whose first offering was Solar X’s 1997 album X-rated, whose funk and disco inflections drew inspiration from its thematic source, pornography. The label soon served as a gathering point for Russian electronica, hosting acts such as EU and Lazyfish and issuing the 1999 Russian IDM compilation Artefacts. London’s Worm Interface Records released Solar X’s third album, Little Pretty Automatic, which was noted for its classical regard for form, precision, and equilibrium. The project marked Belavkin’s final engagement with vintage Russian synths, and even that engagement was only partial, since he had already adopted realtime programs to shorten the route from idea to sound. For 2001’s Chanel N° 303, issued by Germany’s Hymen Records, he discarded the older instruments altogether and substituted modeled emulations inside his computer. By then resident in London, he completed a PhD in Artificial Intelligence and obtained a teaching post in the Computer Science department at Middlesex University.