This track has been composed and produced for Olena Fedorova's performance - "Zone. Motherland" (VCA, Melbourne 2010).

"...“Ashes” is one the most dynamic and dramatic pieces of music in “Zone”. Being also the longest one, it represents the brutal clash of human values, family and community life with tragic circumstances personified throughout the “un-dead” machinery of state in the condition of emergency, contamination and containment.

Original piece of TV news from Russian “Vryemya” channel is a visceral statement of the situation after the peaceful communal existence is torn apart by technological flaws which failed to harness elemental forces of the nature.

The radioactive fallout and the sound of an emergency horn leads into the long and delayed time of awaiting, incertitude and progressing decay which leave us in the aftermath of exposure, destruction and the unsuccessful attempts of unaware human beings to fight with the consequences of the unknown. Long, flooded corridor, attended by fire-fighters is now soaked with water and extinguisher substances which encapsulates danger as a cocoon among the post-industrial remains.

After the climax of the screaming textures, the fallout of gentle percussive patterns emerges invoking a dream-like vision. The female voice singing a prayer in Sanskrit is a universal spiritual aspect of bonds between human life, death and bond between everything that occurs on earth. High-pitched, unstable sound represents the spikes of radiation and a wave form it takes to synchronize into a repetitive pattern from seemingly chaotic instances.