Brand new EP from Darynka

Ukrainian-born producer and visual artist Darynka stands at the crossroads of electronic music, conceptual art and digital identity. With a background as an art curator and visual storyteller, she’s no stranger to translating emotion into experience, but now, working between global hubs like San Francisco, Dubai and Bangkok, she’s taken her creative practice into a more sonically immersive dimension that’s forged in fragility, transformation and the constant motion of contemporary identity.

First unveiling her sound in 2023 with the debut single “The Entrance,” she followed up with a string of impressive tracks before her debut EP, Marketplace of Feelings, landed in February. Now she brings us her latest release with her brand new sophomore EP titled body.404, a release that ventures even deeper into the emotional dissonance of existing in the digital ether.

Built from processed textures, fractured beats and cinematic layering, body.404 is a collection of four tracks that form a structure emotional architecture. It’s music that deconstructs before it builds, existing in the in-between; intimacy without touch, identity without anchors, desire without structure. Instilled with club energy and wrapped in cinematic aesthetic, Darynka takes her sound into something more delicate and destabilised, less about spectacle and more about internal landscapes.

This latest EP examines what it means to inhabit a body that is increasingly digital, fluid and reconfigurable to offer a statement on where we are and where we might be headed. There’s a hyper-personal vocal presence throughout, threading the EP with whispers of the real amid all the synthetic layering of stuttering beats and crisp synths.

Jumping straight into a spacey swirl of hazy synth textures, pulsing beats and processed vocal elements on opening track “Uploaded Body,” the track glides into a dance-focused sound of rolling percussion and fluttering instrumentation. Flowing with infectious rhythm and constantly shifting vocals, the track moves through passages of dreamy, piano-focused moments to deliver a gripping and truly futuristic soundscape packed full of twists and turns.

“Extended Body” follows with the rattle of downtempo beats and spoken-word vocals, forming a contrast between the deep rumble of bass and the playful flicker of jaunty piano flourishes. Propelled by the intricate snaps of drums and bouncy instrumentation, it’s a sensational display of Darynka’s wild creativity and incredible sound design talent.

With “Real Body,” soft orchestral strings dance as the warble of robotic vocal elements enter, met with the mesmeric shuffle of the beat before the track descends into an enveloping scene of fuzzy synth textures and punchy rhythms. Peppered with the delicately melodic dashes of instrumentation and the absorbing burst of synth-driven vibes, the track offers a highly original and thoroughly engaging listening experience from start to finish.

Closing the EP with “Sensual Body,” Darynka picture painting words combine with the stabs of kicking drums and gritty synth tones before giving way to the elegant arrangement of staccato strings, creating an intriguing juxtaposition between the organic instrumentation and the angular bite of digital elements. It’s a superb finale that concludes Darynka’s exceptional new EP which captures the disintegration of the self in a hyper-connected world, not with despair, but with radical honesty. In doing so, she offers a rare kind of solace; a place where we can exist in pieces and still feel whole, presented via a musical work that’s at once musically thrilling and thought-provoking.

Listen to body.404 below