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OLEXI NYKOLAIV is an electronic music artist, producer and pianist from Kyiv, Ukraine, based in Berlin. His broad artistic style is situated in between baroque, avant garde jazz, hip hop and contemporary experimental music and influenced by artists and composers as different as Arca, Vessel, Cecil Taylor, Giacinto Scelsi as well as the representatives of Ukrainian underground music such as Alexandr Nesterov. He describes the process of creating music as part of building an authentic worldview, which he refers to as “the street attitude towards the sublime”, rooted in post-existentialist philosophic tradition, and the conception of “new sincerity”, implying the simultaneity of humour and seriousness.
Born in Kyiv, he learned piano since the age of 9, having a renown Ukrainian-German pianist Yevhen Rzhanov as his teacher. Aside from this, from an early age, he was passionate about science fiction, painting art and fencing. At the age of 15-16 years old, he was influenced by the local experimental scene, which often explored the topics of mysticism. The occult was one ofhis early inspirations, in the form of books by Fulcanelli and Carlos Castaneda as well as the music by the band Coil and the 20th-century Italian hermit-aristocrat Giacinto Scelsi, alongside free jazz, progressive rock and baroque music.
In 2022, he relocated to Germany. Soon after this, he released his first electronic music album, “Feathers and Stalactites”, which garnered very positive feedback from a diverse range of professional artists, including a German performance artist and woodwind player Jeremias Schwarzer as well as an American hip hop producer Ambezza.
