Evgeny Grinko

Artist website: https://evgenygrinko.net

Sometimes music serendipitously travels to different corners of the world without warning. So has it been for Evgeny Grinko, a former noise rock musician whose first foray into the new classical sphere, “Valse,” produced a phenomenon that began organically in Turkey and has since spread throughout the world.

Humor, sadness and longing figure equally in Evgeny’s compositions, which take on cinematic elements that belie their sparse instrumentation. Colors float in and out of the music, from time to time combining to reveal a spontaneous rainbow of sound.

Evgeny initially played drums in indie noise bands in his hometown and a short distance away in Moscow.

He picked up the piano in 2007, training himself and sounding things out. Fast forward 3 years, and “Valse” simply flowed out of him. Says Grinko, “It was a hot summer evening. I was improvising on the piano and the first part of the melody showed itself to me. I knew it was something, so I took out my phone and took a video of my hands playing the melody. This was so different from the music I was playing at the time that I simply forgot about it. Six months later, I returned to the composition, finished it, and immediately uploaded it to Facebook.”