Lokua - Moment 11 - Subterranean - Chicago US - Jul 2007

Biography of Lokua

Location:
Chicago, Illinois
United States

Beat boxing since age 5, Joshua Kleckner aka Lokua, started writing raps and making beats in his teens. After 10 years of producing music for various MCs and singers throughout the mid-west he can now be heard stimulating minds and dance-floors at various clubs in Chicago with emotionally rich textures. Influenced by artists who constantly change and evolve such as DJ Shadow and DJ Krush, Lokua has always experimented with various forms from hip hop to house, jungle, and ambient soundscapes. His style has been called “Simple, reflective, and beautiful”. However you want to classify his music, Lokua’s artistic stamp exists to give the listener an experience that transcends genre.

Slava - Moment 11 - Subterranean - Chicago US - Jul 2007

Biography of Slava

Amidst political confusion, crumbling walls and the rise of the “new Russians” Slava (Stanislav Yurievich Balasanov) learned of the impact of culture on the concept of self. Moving to US shortly after the political turmoil of the early 1990s was not easy. Everything changed. The people, with their strange grins, like a mask that hid god knows what, the vast expanses of shopping malls, the social class system, the luxuriously slow pace of the public school curriculum… A sort of amnesia set in. The overwhelming amount of new information began replacing the older and now obsolete concepts. The past 12 years faded into an uncertainty, a distant past, a forgotten self that was now preoccupied with trying to understand and fit into a new reality. But the memories, despite fading significantly, never left. In fact their distance imbued them with a mythical, almost spiritual significance. Some were specific memories of events, some where memories of feelings. An overwhelming yarning and nostalgia for the old self set in. The process of uncovering began. Free Jazz, Chicago No Wave and noise coupled with Nietzsche’s “One has to destroy in order to create” marked the first stage. Newly learned concepts were now questioned and deconstructed in favor of chaos and pure feeling unadulterated by structure. At the same time, construction of a body of work began with endlessly-overdubbed cassette tapes of abstract jazz and experimental ambience. With these early soundscapes old feelings started to reemerge with greater clarity. In time, as new structures grew and developed, more attention was relegated to standard jazz and music theory. Eventually the preoccupation with texture of sound led to music production. This is when a new identity came into being – an identity not entirely free of any particular culture or musical tradition, but not subject to any of them. The music has come to reflect that as well. There is no specific dedication to genre, only to sound and its emotional content. The music is always performed live and is alive. It is mainly electronic but is often backed by seasoned jazz musicians. At its core is the expression of the self: it is not masked by any particular allegiance to a “scene” or a subculture but is a sincere expression of what it means to be a living, thinking, feeling human being.