Artjom Astrov

Artjom Astrov (b.1989) is a musician based in Vienna. His eclectic composition style incorporates both produced and found sound, digital processing and songwriting. Astrov’s use of voice (spoken word, rapping) can be characterised by a sense of alienated lyricism. As a sound designer for various contemporary performance productions, Astrov has developed a distinctively minimalistic approach that relies on spatial and conceptual properties of sound. As Benzokai, rin la and, most recently, simply as Artjom, he has released several EPs for record labels such as Quantum Natives, Baba Vanga, Trash Can Dance and Serious Serious, an imprint he himself initiated. Founded in 2016 and featuring anything from fashion garments to recordings of street music, Serious Serious documents and showcases a variety of artistic practices, contributing to a collective vision of a music underground. Since 2020, together with artists Michaela Kisling and Till Megerle, Artjom Astrov is part of the project “Guiding Light”. It started as a series of videos and later developed into a band practice that can be defined as “deep hanging out” that is neither predetermined nor random. In their performances, the band plays with extremes and contradictions such as “realness” and “artificiality”, both as visual and performative tools in order to continually question the essence of their work.