The thought behind all of Ruslan Bozhok’s later work with sound was not born in a studio. It was born at Lake Baikal. In the summer of 2005 he travelled these shores himself; in 2006, living by the lake, he launched “Energetic Audio from Baikal” — not music, but field recordings of the places themselves: the wind over Olkhon, the water, the silence of the sacred rocks.
Sound can hold and carry the energy of a place.
It was here that the idea which guides him to this day first took shape. With that project, in 2006, Ruslan was twenty years ahead of his time.
“When you find yourself on Baikal, you’re struck not by its scenery, but by the energy of its sound. Queer gusts of the wind; the waves, either strong or practically inaudible. The energy of Baikal is possible to imprint and to render exactly through the sound.”
“The sense of elevation and spirituality is felt on Baikal — as if you’d touched the mystery of eternity, as if you’d been caught up with the breath of an omnipotent presence.”
Shamanka Rock on Olkhon Island is one of Asia’s most revered places of power — a living trace of a shamanic cult, and one of the sites recorded for the project.
Among the recordings were genuine shamanic rites — captured on Olkhon in their natural setting, not a reconstruction: a real ceremony by a practising shaman, recorded as it happened.
That early idea — sound holds the energy of a place — became the direct ancestor of the provenance approach in Ruslan’s work today: sound assembled from a real place and a real sky, not generated from nothing.
Long before it became a technique, it was a conviction, formed on the shore of the oldest lake on Earth.
Baikal Mystic is a project by Ruslan Bozhok — composer, sound engineer and producer. The same idea now feeds his current work in audio and his music project, Synth Dimension.
Source: baikalmystic.com (Internet Archive, 2006). Photographs, Lake Baikal, 2005.
© Ruslan Bozhok.