Style: modern classical, jazz fusion, progressive rock, folk, new age, minimalism (instrumental)
Recommended for fans of: Ludovico Einaudi, Tigran Hamasyan, Phillip Glass, the chill space-y songs of the Mario Galaxy soundtrack
Country: Russia/United Kingdom
Release date: 28 February 2025
At the blog, we all have our niches. Claire has started her journey here as the foreign language expert; Zach is the prog death king; say the word “neofolk” and Dave is chomping at the bit. I am the weird avant-garde metal guy, so that I’m also the de facto Iamthemorning coverer is probably a surprise. Despite their dark Victorian lyricism, the chamber prog duo are light and fluttery with Gleb Kolyadin’s piano skills the defining instrumental aspect of the band: he’s easily ranked among the best piano players in prog since Iamthemorning’s 2012 debut. After covering their debut in a Lost in Time piece, as well as Marjana Semkina’s1 solo work, Chris handed me the reins to cover Kolyadin’s third solo album2.
With his distinct levity and minimalist classical-with-jazz fusion style, Mobula isn’t a surprising album from Kolyadin, but he changes things up enough from The Outland to make this record stand apart. Rather than playing with a small handful of lengthier, cohesive tracks as he did in 2023, Kolyadin presents Mobula as a series of musical vignettes—fourteen tracks with only one cresting five minutes. Each one unfurls like a short sci-fi poem, but I struggle to find a throughline: some tracks are proggy and orchestrated (“Parallax,” “Fractured,” “Tempest”) while others are Kolyadin alone playing a hundred year old grand piano (“Crystalline,” “Nebular”). Both styles are successful, but the tracklist bears an underlying tension, detracting from the experience of what on the surface is a peacefully atmospheric record.
Kolyadin flaunts his mastery of space across Mobula. On “Glimmer” he begins with a simple minimalist arpeggio which expands to build the universe out of a chord; the grand piano on “Crystalline” has endless depth, Kolyadin’s thoughtful use of silence and the sustain pedal engrossing; and the tricky buildup of “Tempest” creates an epic, giant sound in a crescendo barely lasting 2:30. Kolyadin’s greatest skill on Mobula is his less-is-more approach. Even when songs become more complicated—whether incorporating fretless bass, new age-y flute, or Evan Carson’s percussion—one can easily trace a lineage of their purpose in the song. Mobula features nothing superfluous, and Kolyadin is a uniquely thoughtful composer in the prog world.
The production on Mobula is expansive, filling my headphones with its range of sounds. However, in its atmosphere, the production often seems reverberant and detached, particularly when Kolyadin is alone with the keys. Although capturing something beautiful in a deeply nostalgic way3, the sound isolates the piano from the listener instead of creating an intended sense of tranquil loneliness. The production negatively affects both the guitar and the flute, as well, with the former often a bit shrill during its extended notes and the latter often cheapened to sound like a recorder playing new age (particularly noticeable on “Radiant”).
Although Mobula’s format doesn’t work as well as The Outland’s more traditional structuring, another album focused on these shorter tracks from the poloniumcubes (which is a musical diary for Kolyadin containing over five hundred of these short-form pieces) is an intriguing prospect. With a dozen different concepts, Mobula still has fantastic successes across its less traditional album structure. As mentioned before, “Tempest” is a masterclass in short-form crescendo; the mixing of fretless bass and piano on “Parallax” is unusual but delightful; and intricate finger-picked guitar and violin on “Fractured” support that Kolyadin can successfully extrapolate his unique piano style to other instruments. My problem with Mobula boils down to curation more than anything wrong with the individual tracks, although several feel like half-fleshed ideas—which makes sense as this is the releasing of a musical diary.
Coming from a genre so focused on maximalism, Kolyadin continues his case that a thoughtfully minimalist approach can be as triumphant as the best of the maximalists. Even though I’m not as impressed with Mobula as with his previous works, Gleb Kolyadin is guaranteed to elicit the most beautiful and expansive sounds possible from any piano he lays his deft fingers on.
Recommended tracks: Afterglow, Crystalline, Fractured, Tempest
You may also like: Marjana Semkina, Iamthemorning, Evan Carson, Secludja, John D. Reedy
Final verdict: 6.5/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Facebook | Instagram
Label: KScope – Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website
Gleb Kolyadin is:
Gleb Kolyadin – grand piano, keyboards
Evan Carson – percussion
Vlad Avy – electric guitar (1, 4, 7, 13)
Ford Collier – low whistles (2, 5, 7, 12), bansuri (5) and bombarde (12)
Liam McLaughlin – electric guitar (10, 12)
Zoltan Renaldi – bass (1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 12), upright bass (12)
Charlie Cawood – acoustic & classical guitar, glockenspiel, guzheng, zither, electric kalimba, taishogoto, bow guitar (4, 9)
PJ Flynn – bass (3)
Henry Isaac Bristow – violin (9)
Ilya Izmaylov – cello (1)
Mr Konin – electronic rhythms
- The other half of Iamthemorning ↩︎
- As he covered Kolyadin’s previous album The Outland ↩︎
- I cannot help but compare the intensity of atmosphere on a track like “Observer” with the feeling of desolation on a lonely planet in Mario Galaxy ↩︎
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