Perila’s Ambient Music Finds Strange Beauty in the World Around Us

Alexandra Zakharenko sits at a desk in a room, looking into her laptop, a pair of bulky black headphones clapped over her ears. There is little to orient the eye, so the ears fill in the details. Faint reverb glances off the bare white walls, suggesting the smallness of her space. The rumble of cars and motorcycles on the street below occasionally pushes through Zoom’s noise-cancellation algorithm, turning the quality of our call tinny and digital; now and then, a computer glitch freezes one of her syllables, rendering it bright and harsh, like a brittle scrap of plastic. When a faraway drone indicates a plane passing high above, I find myself imagining what it might look like from her window as it traces a chalky contrail across the sky.

Zakharenko’s music invites thoughts like these. For the past few years, working primarily under the alias Perila, she has massaged the sounds of everyday life into ambient music of unusual detail. Soft, wispy, and pleasingly formless, Zakharenko’s work largely eschews melody and rhythm, and its incidental qualities give it the feel of something found rather than made. A Perila track might evoke running water, mice scuttling through tall grass, a house settling on its foundation as the night air cools. Bright, synthesized tones sometimes cling to her loose weave of whispers and hiss like dewdrops to a spiderweb. That there is so little to grasp onto only makes it that much more captivating.

Zakharenko’s work may be abstract, but she insists that it’s not meant to be difficult or alienating. Instead, it is a direct expression of her moods, mind states, and discoveries. “The music I make is the language I speak with the world, and everyone hears something different,” she says. It can carry a surprisingly personal charge: For me, an extended passage of cowbells makes my mind think back to a rainy night in Crete many years ago, when I camped out on a hill above the sea and awoke to a shepherd leading his flock past my tent. Such reactions, although unpredictable, are intentional, she says. “Everyone is triggered by different sounds or words, so there are a lot of hidden triggers.” She smiles. “That is what I like the most.”

In conversation, Zakharenko can be reflective and intense. She is usually based in Berlin, but when we spoke earlier this year she was visiting the Georgian capital of Tbilisi following a hiking trip to one of that country’s mountainous regions. She describes the rocky area as “foggy, moist, rainy, windy, gray”—a collection of adjectives that could serve just as well to describe practically any given Perila release. She is passionate about the outdoors—how all the built-up stress of city living disappears in nature—and she finds the extremities of Georgia’s landscape, with its abandoned houses and vast expanses of untouched forest, particularly cleansing. “In [Western] Europe, everything is restricted, protected, limited, domesticated,” she says. “But you can’t sell tickets to nature. I need wilderness.”

In conversation, Zakharenko can be reflective and intense. She is usually based in Berlin, but when we spoke earlier this year she was visiting the Georgian capital of Tbilisi following a hiking trip to one of that country’s mountainous regions. She describes the rocky area as “foggy, moist, rainy, windy, gray”—a collection of adjectives that could serve just as well to describe practically any given Perila release. She is passionate about the outdoors—how all the built-up stress of city living disappears in nature—and she finds the extremities of Georgia’s landscape, with its abandoned houses and vast expanses of untouched forest, particularly cleansing. “In [Western] Europe, everything is restricted, protected, limited, domesticated,” she says. “But you can’t sell tickets to nature. I need wilderness.”

Zakharenko makes music of profound intimacy, most of it so hushed that it requires a particular setting to appreciate it: a quiet room, decent sound system, few distractions. On laptop speakers, her music is easily drowned out by even the faintest background noise, but on good speakers or headphones, you find yourself leaning in to capture every crackling twig and intake of breath. At the heart of all her music is an implicit belief in the healing powers of closeness. “Intimacy is just connecting with yourself,” she says. “My life path is to become more whole, and being intimate with yourself is the way to avoid becoming robotic in this crazy whirlwind society. Just give yourself the space to grow.”

At the same time, some sense of digital distancing is fundamental to her work too. Sounds and impressions are removed from their contexts, represented as free-floating swatches of tone. There’s a subtle tension at play: The naturalism of her source material suggests first-hand immersion in a vivid if unidentifiable soundscape, yet a faint scrim of digital distortion evokes the mediation inherent in apps like Zoom, FaceTime, and YouTube. The impure textures of her music sometimes make it seem as though she were focusing on the smudged, pixelated screen that separates us from the world.

Zakharenko was born and raised in St. Petersburg in the early ’90s, part of a middle-class family whose values did not always align with those of the new Russia. Her mother earned her degree in philology, then went to work as a banker after Zakharenko’s birth. When the bank collapsed, her mother became an English teacher. Zakharenko’s father, who died five years ago, was an anesthesiologist and a devoted Buddhist who loved music. He collected jazz records, along with ones by Prince, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Radiohead. “I had a big Radiohead period,” Zakharenko recalls. “Maybe it was because I felt a lack of emotion in society when I was growing up, but the music I listened to always had a lot of emotion.” And though her father never performed publicly, at kvartirnik—informal (and illegal) Soviet-era domestic gatherings where friends would play music and drink late into the night—he could always be counted on to pull out his guitar.

At 18, Zakharenko moved to Moscow, where she started out studying philology before shifting to graphic design. But then, she says, “I quit and slowly started melting into music.” She played in a a drums-and-synth duo as well as an indie-rock band called Самое Большое Простое Число (the Largest Prime Number). When she was a member of the latter group (that’s a young Zakharenko standing somewhat stiffly in the video for 2011’s “Втроем”), they were playing in tiny clubs for double-digit crowds, but today, СБПЧ, as they are commonly known, are celebrated Russian pop stars.

While living in Moscow, Zakharenko briefly visited Berlin as a tourist; she liked it so much that she decided to try living there. “I always had this craving not to be in Russia,” she says. That was seven years ago. Finally, this past January, she was awarded a residential German visa as an artist. She also travels frequently to Tbilisi, where her partner lives, and where there is a growing community of expats who feel unsafe in Putin’s Russia, where dissent is criminalized and the LGBTQIA+ community lives under the constant threat of state violence. “I’m proud to be a Russian, but in terms of politics, it’s very disturbing,” she says. “I just don’t feel comfortable there in terms of my freedom. Even not doing anything wrong, you can still be pretty fucked. There’s not a lot of hope for change there.”

Zakharenko operates mainly outside the overground music industry, instead trickling out her work across a smattering of under-the-radar imprints like Manchester’s Sferic, London’s the Trilogy Tapes, and Barcelona’s Paralaxe Editions. She is remarkably prolific, keeping up a steady stream of self-released music on Bandcamp. “It is like the sonic diary of my life,” she says.

Perila’s highest-profile album to date, How Much Time It Is Between You and Me?, was recently released on Oslo’s Smalltown Supersound, which has put out records by electronic innovators like Annie, Lindstrøm, and Kelly Lee Owens. Joakim Haugland, who founded Smalltown Supersound in 1993, says the process of assembling Zakharenko’s record was especially effortless. “There was no pushing to meet deadlines, no managers, just this natural thing between her and me,” he adds. “I told her that working with this album reminded me why I started to release music in the first place.”

Zakharenko recorded part of the record last year in a mountain village in France where her aunt has a house. She was alone, with no internet access. She spent her days hiking and making music on her computer; she spoke to almost no one. She ate simple meals and slept in a small attic room; a window in the roof afforded her an unobstructed view of mountains and sky. At night, everything was still except for a small river near the house. She found the soundscape mesmerizing. “I could really feel the mountains talking to me,” she says. “Nature seemed so old and wise there.”

Almost immediately, Zakharenko found her perception of time beginning to change, and she began to conceive of an album that might encompass a range of her thoughts, impressions, and research into the experience of time. In such a rural setting, using too many synthetic sounds seemed somehow inappropriate, and so she recorded what was around her instead—the river, the wind, the birds. Her perception of sound began to shift, too: Small sounds, like the creak of her chair, ballooned in volume. She considers How Much Time It Is Between Us? to be experimental music in the most literal sense of the term: a set of emotional data points resulting from her investigations in the mountains. “I want to show what I discovered there,” she says. “That it’s necessary to slow down, to feel time. The beauty lies in the process, not the result.”

Alexandra Zakharenko: There’s so much information in the air already, and I just try to observe as much as possible and see what it triggers inside of me. Last year was a very weird year in a way that we all know, but at the same time it was one of the most transformative times of my life because I had time to slow down. I was working a lot, but I was just observing things in a very narrow frame: room, balcony, nothing going on—but there was so much going on inside. All these discoveries make me deeper, happier. If I can do that, everyone has the ability to do that. You just have to be curious and work a little bit.

It’s becoming more predominant. I’m constantly searching for new means of self-expression, and I’ve found that in field recordings. In part, that’s because I connect them with nature, but I also like the spontaneity and unpredictability. I like music where you don’t know exactly what will happen. I process most of my field recordings, but I like to leave some practically as they are, just to be closer to reality, closer to nature. I like that field recording activates your brain, triggers memories and feelings. I really like the drone of the city from my balcony. In the noise of the city, I increasingly hear all these rhythms. Sometimes I hear all these melodies just pouring a glass of water. I hear music without anyone playing it. People want to produce more and more, and invent more and more, but there’s already so much beauty as it is.

I know ASMR, and it also triggers me, but I wouldn’t say I have ASMR like you see it on the internet. For me, the subtlety and quietness are about intimacy. I think there’s a lack of intimacy in music, or in our lives, even. So by putting the naked self out there, I try to evoke deeper levels of listening. Mostly, it’s just about being sincere and sometimes putting the listener in an uncomfortable place.

Like the track I recorded on the new album, “Vaxxine,” which is just my vocal. I had just come from a hiking trip in the mountains, and I just started singing. There weren’t any prepared lyrics. This is just what I had inside, and I gave it a space, let it go, and this is what happened. A lot of my music and ideas are about that. Just give space and things will evolve.

I can’t imagine making music meticulously. It’s not in my nature. Mine is more of an expressionist vibe, just [makes zapping noise]—what I feel. Sometimes I can make two or four tracks in a day, in one breath. But because my music is so emotional, I get burned out. There’s so much of myself inside the music I make that in the end, I find myself very empty. But I’m learning how to leave something for myself.

Sometimes I’ll try to make a track with beats, and I’m like, “Oh, cool beats.” But then they become so mechanical and patterned, and I just get bored. And then I delete all the beats and add some chaotic field recordings and I’m like, “Yeah, this feels right.”

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