Katya Prokina thrives in liminal spaces, making music that sits between continents and states of consciousness. A decade ago, as a member of a dream-pop band called Tip Top Tellix, the Russian producer, vocalist, and classically trained violinist tried to “embody the phenomena of listening to music while falling asleep,” with pleasant-enough results. Going solo as Katya Yonder, she succeeded more fully across three eerie ambient cassettes for the St. Petersburg label Floe, culminating with 2017’s Winter Skins, a patient, drifting album that evokes a snowy mountainside glimpsed from the brink of oblivion. Yonder’s fourth album, Multiply Intentions, is her boldest effort at boundary-blurring yet.
Born out of a 2018 mix for well-traveled Berlin label Métron, Multiply Intentions explores Yonder’s perspective as a native of Yekaterinburg, a former Soviet industrial hub located on the border between Europe and Asia. Spacey electronics coexist with the earthy hum of Azerbaijani folk instruments, and the lyrics traverse from Yonder’s primary Russian to Japanese, English, and French. That intercontinental concept underpins an album that’s just as absorbing for how it flits across other thresholds: between pop and experimentation, authenticity and fantasy. With spectral vocals, watery chimes, pulsing bass, and hardly any drums, Multiply Intentions captures what it might feel like to listen to music while falling asleep on the Trans-Siberian Railway, or whatever path might best lead to someplace you’ve only imagined.
Although Multiply Intentions is the first Yonder album with prominent vocals, it’s more atmospheric than conventionally song-based, and not only due to the comprehension barrier for anyone who isn’t quadrilingual. Her opening words, a Russian-language declaration that she’s plunging headlong into something like an abyss, are barely audible amid Uncut Gems-like synth burbles and woodwind flutters. When Yonder’s high lilt first comes to the fore, murmuring about having “to stop for a while” over the LaserDisc science-special shimmer of “Solution,” her words are still slightly out of reach, an effect like a British folk ballad plopped down in 1980s hyperreality. “Another Time,” the most propulsive of these 14 tracks, hits harder in context than it otherwise might, because its aching synth-pop is tucked amid all this heady reflection.
Multiply Intentions invites you to keep puzzling over it after listening, especially its songs that sit at especially sharp divides. “Наверняка” (“For Sure”) is coolly intoned in throaty Russian, but its hypnotic organ squiggles wouldn’t be out of place in the belly dance music of Egyptian legend Hany Mehanna. Its serenely ringing arpeggios, meanwhile, keep sending me to French duo Air’s Japan-seeking “Alone in Kyoto”—originally from the soundtrack to 2003’s Lost in Translation, aptly enough. The next track, “Invented Journey,” a centerpiece of Yonder’s 2018 mix, is the first track here with lyrics in Japanese, which Yonder studied in school. Though her engagement with the language is evident, she has never actually been to Japan. The ghostly echoes and bird-chirp sound effects of “Invented Journey” are transportive, but to someplace misty and not quite there, like trying to remember a Kate Bush song your subconscious made up overnight.
Kate NV, Yonder’s fellow Russian electronic artist, is an easy comparison, but also a fitting one. With Multiply Intentions, Yonder too has made an otherworldly album that defies all borders. On the finale, “Interlude,” another lushly arrayed standout from the 2018 mix, she delivers a French translation of a German poem by a Romanian-born writer: a dreamy postcard from an undefined utopia. Long after Multiply Intentions ends, the possibility of such a place stays with you.
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