Yana Kedrina wants to scale a rather steep hill. Many months ago, before the pandemic hit, she was looking for a shady spot to hide from the Moscow heat in Tsaritsyno, the park reserve and palace-turned-museum founded by Catherine the Great in the late 18th century. It’s one of her favorite places in the Russian capital, full of lush greenery and large ponds concentrated around neo-Gothic houses and palaces. At night, when she likes to visit, the fountains often dance with colorful lights and music like The Lord of the Rings soundtrack. “The architecture here is really fairylike,” she adds.
Perhaps it’s an apt observation coming from an artist who’s often inspired by the mythical. Working under the alias Kedr Livanskiy (Russian for “Lebanon cedar”), Kedrina evokes an otherworldliness in her ethereal vocals and hazy production—even when she turns up the bright, ravey energy, like on 2019’s Your Need. In her new video for “Ivan Kupala (New Day),” as she frolics the forest and city with some skater boys, she totes either a sword, a cape, a bow and arrow, or an enormous flag in every scene. The song, with its ominous synth drone, dazzling breakbeat, and whimsical fluteline, is an action-fantasy in its own regard, teetering on the edge of danger up until a hopeful ending. Rhythmically, her music is rooted in the club, but spiritually, it feels centuries old.
Growing up, Kedrina lived in Moscow but spent time in her grandmother’s country village, which informed her love of nature. Music was always her main passion, starting with the Spice Girls’ Girl Power! Live in Istanbul videotape, which she watched a thousand times as a kid. In between classes at school, she would sing songs by the Russian rock vocalist Zemfira. Eventually her desire for self-expression led her to join the pop-punk band Hethburger from 2009 to 2011, where she sang about life as an endless party while lying onstage blind drunk. Meanwhile, she spent her days discussing intellectual ideas and literature with friends. It was a formative time. “I’m a punk,” Kedr answers simply when I ask what this period of life taught her. “It’s a state of mind. I’m almost 30, and I know that although it’s good to have material values, I don’t get caught up having them.”
Kedr didn’t want to limit herself musically, so she left the punk band and made friends with those who later formed Gost Zvuk, the left-field electronic label. Being close to producers who were relentlessly experimenting changed the way she approached her own music: Though she used to pay attention mostly to the lyrics, she started getting deeper into the structure of her songs. She picked up on the basics of Ableton from techno producer and then-boyfriend Pavel Milyakov, aka Buttechno. And she pulled from her studies at the Moscow School of New Cinema, where she learned the rules of film directing and editing. A solo electronic star slowly emerged.
“I always felt misunderstood, that people don’t really know who I am,” she says. “I can’t let myself behave the way that I am because of the borders, habits, defense mechanisms coming from my childhood.” But as she dug deeper into songwriting, Kedr realized she could express what she felt but could never say. “It was like a cure.”
Her music as Kedr Livanskiy was captivating from the start, as far back as 2014, thanks to her ear for hooks and smart production choices. Her debut EP, Солнце января (January Sun), released in 2015 and later reissued by 2MR, set the baseline for her distinctive style of lo-fi ambient house music, with hypnotic vocals and reverbed synths. On 2017’s Ariadna, she explored more dramatic techno terrain, casting an escapist mood over the project. Loneliness and isolation were the album’s key themes, and for a time that became Kedr’s own reality. She turned away from other people while working on Ariadna: Being an open person had always taken great effort, and she felt she needed to prove herself as a musician. But in the aftermath of the record, Kedr fell into a deep depression. She struggled with feeling like a fraud, belittling herself over making “pop music.”
One day in early 2018, she went to see Gost Zvuk boss Ildar Zaynetdinov and experimental producer Flaty. They asked her what she aspired to do next. Feeling lost, she didn’t know what to say. Ildar suggested she make a track with Flaty. The two ended up writing together for 10 days in Moscow, on what would become Your Need. “I liked Kedr’s project from her very first songs because of the vibe they had,” Flaty tells me. “We listened to tons of music while composing together—British electronic stuff from the ’90s, Brazilian funk, ghetto house, trance, non-dance tracks—and got inspired.” Their collaboration yielded Kedr’s most eclectic, colorful songs to date—she compares Your Need to a rainbow—and revitalized her sense of creative trust in others. “If you are working with someone, that doesn’t mean you’re less talented and you need someone to help you,” she says. “It’s fun to develop a deeper kind of connection on the musical level, that’s beautiful.”
Since the album’s release last year, Kedr has been performing and DJing around Europe and the U.S. on and off, at least up until the pandemic hit. As she quarantines in Moscow, she’s working on a new album as well as music for a side project. She’s also livestreaming her own record-digging show, called “Kedr by the Stove.” For a little over an hour, she puts on her favorite music that can’t be Shazamed or streamed and, in Russian, tells stories about the artists; she also sings an unreleased outtake each time. “The name of the show came from when I lived in a one-room apartment,” Kedr says. “The room was taken by Buttechno, so I had to work on my music out of a tiny kitchen. Also, a stove looks like a CD turntable, and in Russian we have the same word for preparing something, like a mix, and cooking [готовить].” And just like her songs, “Kedr by the Stove” feels completely off the cuff and yet simultaneously well-prepared.
Kedr Livanskiy: I don’t really pay attention. People understand everything. They often write to me, “I don’t know Russian but I feel what it is about.” Words are not that important. They make the reality more concrete, while music transmits something elusive. That’s why my lyrics are so abstract. I tend to create images, not anything specific.
Surely, many people weren’t accepting of me—I’m a singer, and moreover I sing in Russian! Some friends hurt my feelings when they got drunk. One of them carelessly said, “What the fuck, why the hell are you doing this? We’re onto some serious business here. We are musicians.” I just started crying when he was telling me all this. Then Ariadna came out, and he messaged me, “Oh shit, I’m in London high on cocaine listening to Ariadna on repeat, this is mind-blowing!” He told me he had been listening to the album for five days. Then he apologized and said, “I understood what you’re about. You have your own way, you’re doing your own thing.” I wasn’t trying to step on anyone’s territory or prove that I’m cool. I was just making music, being in the context where I could discuss it and play live. Some snobbish people looked askance at me.
You know, I think a lot of people are afraid of doing anything. Some musicians produce tracks with no intention of releasing them. They polish every sound, deepening their knowledge about music, but can’t let themselves demonstrate what they do. I’m not hiding, I show what I’m making. That’s why someone like me can seem irritating to them. I accept that.
I’m a modern musician. When [the great Russian poet] Alexander Pushkin was writing “Boris Godunov” or “Ruslan and Ludmila,” he was using the language of the era he was living in. Thanks to new instruments and new types of thinking, new forms appear. I stopped listening to lo-fi and am generally not interested in it right now, and I want my music to be different. I’m digging constantly and get driven by new discoveries.
I used to make music in fits and starts. It all depended on my self-esteem. If it went down, I wasn’t able to do anything. If it went up, I threw myself into working for a week or two, then getting depressed or partying and drinking. Now I understand that obviously my mood can be different, but my self-esteem must be a constant, not connected with my emotional condition. You’re not a god, you’re not a piece of shit. You’re just OK. When you have this basis, you can just do what you do more frequently, decently, and with more pleasure. It’s impossible to rely on strokes of insight—they often come during the process.
Now I sharpen my technical skills. I can work on something for two weeks and not like it at all, but I don’t stop. I understand that I’m developing the foundation. When it hits me, I know how to transform it into the result. This balance is very delicate. I feel I can lose it at any moment, but I hope it won’t happen. There’s a lot of work to be done.
Perhaps I have a different attitude towards this feeling. There’s an understanding that you cannot fully unburden yourself to anyone—and nobody can, so all people are similar, really, not totally understood by each other. And this moment of realizing this contradiction… Sometimes you might go through a mutual feeling of loneliness, and it's like going through eternity. It’s hard to describe, I’m trying to explain it to myself. So, this feeling is cool when you don’t run away from other people, when you’re open and you just say: “Hey, I need to be alone right now.” You don’t escape into the feeling—you nobly come into it.
