ainm

Ainm is an ambient- and electronica-oriented one-man project started in 2005 by Moscow composer and musician Ilya Kovalev (now living in the UK).

Born in 1978, Ilya learnt to play piano and French horn at school and later picked up guitar, bass and various woodwinds. By the age of 15 he found it very entertaining to fiddle with cassettes and tape-machines, creating multi-layered ambient and noise records by means of anything that could produce sound. Several home-made cassette EPs survived from these years, containing some almost audible funny sounds buried in tape hiss and rumble. The lo-fi ambient trend was lately recovered in one of his side-projects “Inner Mongol”. Seeking for some band playing experience, Ilya spent 5 years as a keyboardist, winds and bass player in Moscow indie-pop duo (basically studio-oriented, though they played some gigs). At the meantime he kept trying to find his own music niche, creating very different pieces influenced by a vast variety of styles and genres, from 90s IDM to early European music and Byzantine chant. Thus the project Ainm emerged.

Ainm (Irish word for ‘name’) follows the style that could be described very roughly as ‘historical ambient’ (with great reserve, taking in account that sometimes it is not ambient at all). He combines computer music techniques with strong interest to authentic acoustic instruments as well as historical musical forms and aesthetics, trying to stay away from naïve New Age-esque attempts to “perform medieval/ethnic music in contemporary way”. Although the artist tends to use certain ‘historical’ elements in his music, such as alternative tuning scales, timbres of early instruments, some bits of medieval music theory, he deliberately avoids any stylisations and performs only original material. One of the basic principles of Ainm’s sound design is to make electronic timbres sound as ‘natural’ as possible, while transforming the sound of acoustic instruments, to offer it an odd ‘synthetic’ flavour. With regards to possible live presentation of this music, Ainm seeks to involve more 'live' musicians into the project and tries to develop a special approach to stage performance (such as combining live playing with sampling and looping, using various MIDI-control gear etc., rather than just playing studio multitrack from laptop).

More information and more songs @ MySpace
http://www.myspace.com/ainm