Gultskra Artikler, the recording project of Moscow-based Alexey Devyanin, has a small handful of digital, CD, and LP releases out on the Autoplate, Please Do Something, Saag, Hyperboloid, Nexsound, Top 40, Lampse, Miasmah, and Other Electricities labels. “Galaktika” is a deliciously heady slab of yellow vinyl that delivers deep cosmic drones coasting somewhere alongside Sun Ra, Battlestar Galactica, Han Solo’s most far out dreams, and Tarkovsky.

The solo-mission atmospherics are desolate with the exception of mechanical glitches and control panel warbles from the shuttle as it rumbles toward the darkest corners of unknown, uninhabited space. Angelic voice traces from life back on Earth breeze by to haunt the cosmonaut’s hazy memory, making for an especially disorienting, Solaris-like psychological experience as the mind and body attempt to adjust to zero gravity and zero human interaction.

On Side A closer “Saturn” Devyanin produces the sound of electrical wires run amok, cut in half and flailing around the vessel leaving sparkling droplets of electrical fire. The range of sounds he’s able to make sonically captures the space drift event in all its epic, alien, and isolated glory. As we get further into Side B the interstellar ghosting gets more terrifying, not due to the presence of human-hating alien life forms, but from the internal disruption coinciding with the foundationless drift into deep space uncertainty.

As the album art – made by Devyanin himself – displays, the distinction between the outside and the inside of the vessel strengthens with each push further into the void. The voyager will always be trapped inside, gazing out at blackness and mystery, but with increasing wonder and awe at the starry heavens above, as German outer space-theorist Kant might say. 7/10 -- Elliott Sharp (11 August, 2010)