GALYA BISENGALIEVA - Polygon Reflections

I wanted to hold the beauty and the violence together

Galya Bisengalieva (easterndaze)

In northeastern Kazakhstan, a vast expanse of grey grass makes up the Semipalatinsk steppe, a remote, isolated site chosen by the Soviet Union as a nuclear "polygon". Atomic testing irreversibly reshaped the landscape, dotting the plateau with brutalist bunkers, sinister trapezoidal concrete formations.

It's from this desolate ecosystem that Galya Bisengalieva set out for her 2023 album "Polygon". Here the Kazakh violinist immerses her instrument in barren electronic textures, minimal glitches and measured beats that dematerialize the melodies, turning them into echoes of an archaic past infected by human ingenuity.

Bisengalieva's ambient is to Brian Eno what Roy Andersson is to Wes Anderson. The work is bleak, painting emptiness with style.

“Polygon Reflections”, released two years later, is billed as a remix album, but on first listen it immediately comes across as a self-sufficient work in its own right, massive and severe. The musicians brought in to collaborate engage in a radical rewriting of the tracks, carving out new architectures to haunt with ghosts, expanding the suggestions into hallucinations, and delivering a work that the word monumental describes perfectly.

The hazy atmosphere of the original “Alash-kala” is upended in The Bug's incendiary version, transfigured by atomic winds. The crushing beat, the electronics building in cadence toward granular feedback explosions, the dilated dub pacing all stage the delirium of catastrophe with post-industrial incursions reminiscent of Nine Inch Nails in their “Not Actual Events” mode. A brutality that's genuinely satisfying to listen to, before sinking into the alarmed calm of the double “Saryzhal”, reworked with divergent outcomes by the sensibilities of Hatis Noit and KMRU.

In the first edition, a wounded female voice evolves her narrative from a shaken spoken delivery into a fragile song, laid over a dark, powerful drone bed that grows in scope and density until it falls silent and merges into the layered ambient pièce of the second edition; an act of depositing and stilling the same material.

“Polygon” crumbles into glitch and artifacts, amid which a monotone voice bears witness to trauma; the textures and violin notes enrich the atmosphere like the flickers cast by a night fire around which people gather to remember. A folk song crackles from an old speaker, a symbol of an annihilated past, confined to the precarious instruments of post-atomic civilization.

Nature then reveals itself in the more reflective wings of “Sary-Uzen” (the river flowing north of the Polygon) and “Balapan” (an image of rural villages); and in the transfigured voice of Aisha Devi, who on “Chagan” (the atomic lake created by the explosions) performs like a bucolic, transcontinental Baby Grace from “1.Outside”.

The album's true marvel, however, lies in its finale, with the double “Degelen” handed first to Alva Noto and then to Kevin Richard Martin (aka The Bug). Alva Noto's rewrite orchestrates electronics alongside Bisengalieva's violin in a vital blossoming, a piece of sound poetry devoted to the steppe. The dreamlike atmosphere of the vibratos and the refined circuital electronic notes becomes an eagle's flight over endless distances; the experience of an absence charged with vital force. The intensity, building in a crescendo and sustained by sumptuous sonic beds and violin excursions, opens up, amid reverbs and fragmentations, into a glitch beat generated from remote sonic regions.

Martin picks up the industrial sound of the first track but slows it down and lulls it with a hypnotic beat diluted into a thick, barely-moving feedback, modulating its intensity, deepening or lightening the atmosphere in a catacomb-like trip-hop interplay of void and fullness.

A precious work, perhaps even more evocative than the original, that evokes the most metaphysical of rationalities: the hallucinated dream of human omnipotence. From these uninhabitable natural landscapes, these tracks resurface like the ruins of Ozymandias: “...look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

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07/03/2026