Composer and music producer Oleg Krylov has primarily worked in movies, television and classical worlds, but he is taking his music now into the realms of rap, pop, indie-rock, jazz, electronic, and experimental music.
He is doing it now, at Christmas, with his newest single, a delightful fusion of all those genres in a Christmas song that is definitely not your typical yule season music.
It’s not just the rap verses, or the hip-hop beats and slow-tempo pop melodies and jazz rhythms in the chorus. It is also the fact that the song is set the day after Christmas, with all the hectic buildup — shopping, wrapping, cooking, traveling, and partying – done, and in the afterglow of the season between the actual day and the return to the regular world.
“You haven’t come back to your routine, right? But you’re still inside of the spirit of Christmas, and at this very intimate moment when you are alone, there is still a kind of echo of the celebration,” he said.
“And you are remembering yesterday’s Christmas and other Christmases, other celebrations, back in a kind of time machine, and you have one more day before you go back to your work.”
From verse 1, delivered by Oleg’s male rapper:
Life flies, in the background.
Not bothering my surround.
Past appears in my mind,
All the years combined like
Holidays, birthdays
Young love, carefree days.
The chorus, sung by the female vocalist:
Happy New Year, Merry Christmas,
Moment is here, let magic kiss us,
Scene from the past, lights blink all night,
Future is vast, new journeys, new heights.
Oleg sought an upbeat song for Christmas with a slow tempo to create a joyful, reflective mood, looking back at the pleasures without the pressures.
“It shouldn’t be before Christmas, because you go crazy with all these discounts, you need to be on time, you need to prepare everything. Friends, gifts, all of that mess.”
For Oleg, music is a joy to be shared. His work moves the music in his head through a winnowing, refining process.
“I want to share the music I have, because I compose the music I like,” he said.
He compares the process to sharing the things of your day. On your way somewhere you see something interesting, or startling, or beautiful, and when you get home or to work, you share it.
So it is with music.
“When I come up with something, a melody, or a sound, like when I’m driving, if it’s trash, I just forget about it. But if it is worth something, I go home and write it down and continue working on that, and the next stage starts.”
The next stage is making the melody, creating the structure, shaping the music to the appropriate genre, mixing and mastering.
“And at each of these stages, there is a filtering process,” he said.
Oleg contracts with session musicians for the vocalists in his songs. He shuffled through three before finding the rapper he wanted for “Christmas Flashbacks.”
He has been working with music since about 1995, when he was 10. He is classically trained and has worked academically as well as in television, movies, theater and ballet. For the last five years he has lived and worked in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
By the time he was 14, in 1998, he had begun using cutting-edge digital music tools and technologies as they became available.
“They provided me the opportunity to realize my music ideas without the need for hard-to-find and expensive musicians,” he said.
It is only recently that he began creating music for and publishing in mainstream genres.
“I started quite late,” he said. “Like, this year.”
He hears the music in his head and wants to develop and share it. With movie scores, maybe the movie gets released, maybe it doesn’t, the music is ignored or lost, and if the project is released, the audience interest is limited to the film or show.
Oleg has realized that the popular genres of music are themselves tools that allow him to translate his music, “the music I hear inside myself,” for a wider audience.
“The mainstream audience understands the languages of pop, jazz, hip-hop and the other genres, but not the symphonic form,” he said. “Mainstream styles are a way to reach the hearts of a wider audience. I act as a translator from academic and orchestral musical languages.”
His musical philosophy, stated in his official bio, is that “every song should be beautiful, funky, expressive or a blend of these traits” and “music is the language of the soul.”
And his range, he says, is from symphonic to hip-hop. That breadth is evident in “Christmas Flashbacks.”
He works in what he calls “parallels,” and the process he describes is that working on one thing gives him musical ideas to play with along another track. He has a song in process now on a parallel inspired by “Christmas Flashbacks” and hopes to release it in January.
“When I work on them in my music, the parallels give me sounds and figures, kind of like musical free gifts, and I like to play with them. If I feel they are interesting, I continue working on it. That’s what happened with the melody and the kind of scene space that formed the whole song in ‘Christmas Flashbacks.’”
Take a ride on his parallel tracks and connect to Oleg Krylov on all platforms for new music, videos, and social posts.
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