With silent film cinematic aesthetics imbued with unique and 21st-century flair, Ukranian Coldwave Duo The Glass Beads invoke sorrowful sounds, both strange and sensual, on their debut LP Therapy, melancholic life stories focused on the search and struggle of trying to find your way as an individual way and to accept yourself. These themes explored on the record are filled with pain and anger as well as hope. The Glass Beads feature the talents of musicians Mark Arshynnikov and Morin Sane, a pair of musicians whose Slavic features construct an appearance that is altogether commanding, beautiful and timelessly Gothic, yet gracefully tempered with a modern and tasteful style woven between two eras of the centennial: 1920, and now. In collaboration, Mark and Morin conjure melodies that reverberate like footsteps through the hallways of an abandoned house, haunted by memories of love, sickness, and death. Their melodic music is interwoven with sighing keys, palpitating drum machines, sauntering basslines, and disaffected vocals like an eastern European version of Velvet Underground chanteuse Nico. It has been 4 years since the two made their debut with “Going”, a song that would two years later make itself part of The Glass Beads’ 4 track debut EP Phobia issued on cassette via Squall Records. For that release, The Wave of Things spotlighted the pair in their Sounds of Ukraine episode, Describing them as a cross between Lebanon Hanover and Drunken C, and highlighted their mesmerizing video for the title track “Phobia” where a blindfold vocalist Morin Sane drifts amongst a field of sunflowers in stark black and white. The first introduction to the music on Therapy was previewed last spring and summer, with “Music Box”, a swirling spectral song that lives up to its namesake, and the brooding basslines of “City of Anger”, a song that slowly wanders into lyrics fraught with the burden of painful endurance sung with a captivating vocal. This was followed by the suspenseful piano-laden track “Monster”, a song that frequently graced the most popular international Darkwave DJ playlists well into the autumn. These first tastes of the record garnered the attention of Molchat Doma’s Roman Komogortsev, who would go on to mix and master the tracks for the signing to legendary Greek label Fabrika Records, home to She Past Away, Selofan, and Lebanon Hanover.
