Ilia Bukharov
Sonic Buckwit
My name is Ilya Bukharov. I live in Chelyabinsk — a city that never needed lyricism. Metallurgy, industry, a horizon cut by factory chimneys. This is where I wrote everything that is worth hearing.
Music began for me in 1998. Or rather, with two tape recorders, a microphone, and some irrational desire. The Prodigy and The Fat of the Land were what blew my head open back then. I understood literally nothing about music. I couldn’t tell an octave from a semitone by ear. Absolute zero. But that was never going to stop me.
When I turned eighteen, I wanted to play electric guitar. I couldn’t afford one, so I built it myself. Then another one. And another. The first four electric guitars in my life were handmade. I think that says something about my character.
For me, the guitar was never just an instrument. It was an interface — my first way of understanding how music works from the inside. Through it, I learned to feel structure, tension, and the movement of sound. Everything else I had to learn on the way.
At eighteen, I put together my first band. None of us could actually play, and I mean that literally. I was the leader, the one bringing in musical ideas, shaping direction, trying to turn raw desire into songs. It was a school with no teachers: persistence, obsession, immersion, and the need to make the kind of music I wanted to hear myself.
The next step was K Seven. My role there became more focused. I was mainly the composer and arranger, the source of musical ideas that the rest of the material grew from. The band brought together me and the bassist from my first group — by then we had become a kind of well-tuned mechanism for generating music. The vocalist and drummer came from a completely different band, almost a different world. In life, we were very different people. In music, something clicked with absolute precision.
The peak was a show at Tele-Club in Yekaterinburg, one of the legendary venues of the Urals. It was one of those nights when everything aligned: the sound, the state we were in, the unity inside the band, and the response from the room. After that show, the sound producer of Jane Air wrote to us, saying he really liked what he heard and offering to record an album with us. In the summer of 2007, during his five-day visit from Saint Petersburg to Chelyabinsk, we recorded twelve tracks. It was a beautiful time.
That album was supposed to come out on Kapkan Records, one of the key independent rock labels in Russia at the time. It never did. The band broke up. Some stories don’t end with a full stop. They simply continue somewhere else.
People sometimes ask why I left guitar music behind. I don’t think I really left it. It’s just that guitar music now feels oversaturated to me — too many layers, too much intention, too much insistence. I am drawn to music that leaves space. A hint of music rather than music declaring itself too loudly. Groove without an overload of meaning. Abstraction that creates more room than any direct statement ever could.
The guitar never disappeared. It just stopped being a source of parts and became a way of hearing.
The road went through trance and through different forms of techno. That part is ordinary enough. But at some point I heard Anton Kubikov’s music, and I understood what exactly had been missing for me: groove, atmosphere, restraint, taste, minimalism. That feeling of there being exactly enough in the music — and not a single sound more.
That became a kind of compass. Dub techno turned out to be not just a genre for me, but the exact language for the things I keep thinking about: post-apocalypse, consciousness, humanity, the universe, the physical laws we still haven’t discovered.
For a long time, I made music entirely for myself. I didn’t think about releases. I didn’t think about an audience. I was simply making the music I wanted to hear. In 2022, inspired by Kubikov’s music, I sent material to the Lithuanian label Greyscale — and instead of debuting with a single track, I ended up releasing a full EP.
Since then, I’ve released two EPs on Greyscale, along with tracks on Crossfade Sounds, PIRANHA SIBERIA DUB, and Superordinate Dub Waves, plus a number of artist mixes, including one for the DUBBISM podcast on PIRANHA SIBERIA DUB. For me, this was never a career ladder. It was proof that authenticity works. That when you are not trying to attract attention by making something fashionable, but instead trying to find your own sound, the right people somehow hear it.
Sometimes a track begins with a single sound. Sometimes with a rhythm that catches on something inside me. From there, it becomes a process I can only describe as searching for the next right sound — or just as importantly, the right emptiness. I never know in advance what the result is supposed to be. It feels more like moving through darkness by touch.
I don’t consciously choose a genre, a sonic identity, or even a mood. What comes out is simply what comes out on its own. Maybe that is why I have no shame in listening to my own tracks as if they were my favorite music. Because that is exactly what I was trying to make: the music I wanted to hear myself. And sometimes, luckily, I manage to do it.
When I feel that a track sounds the way it is supposed to sound, I record a live take, do a little editing, and upload it to YouTube. Just to preserve that moment.
Alongside music, I am also an artist, a product builder, and an entrepreneur. In 2014, I hand-drew an animated music video for the Russian rap group Triagrutrika — Человек дождя — which went on to get over a million views. The first and the last music video I ever made. I’ve also launched several products, from mobile applications to AI-based services.
There is a person inside me who avoids attention, and another one who wants to be heard. I think that tension is one of the reasons I make music.
I am a producer more than a DJ. But my direction now is clear: to play my music live, in the moment, for people. Not just streaming numbers. A real sensation in space and time.
If you are reading this, then something brought you here. I’m glad it did.
Sonic Buckwit
Chelyabinsk, Russia
