Day Hospital began not in a studio, but between a hospital bed and whatever lies just beyond it - that blurred zone where time dilates, bodies stall, and thought starts looping on itself. Out of that suspended space, Copycat Department shapes a sound project that treats techno and experimental music as twin methods for charting vulnerability and resistance. The album’s tracks feel written in the margins of medical charts: pulses like monitors, hissing textures like ventilation systems, bass that hums with the quiet menace of distant machinery. Yet there is nothing clinical about the result; the music transforms this environment of waiting and transformation into a charged interior landscape, where each kick, click, and drone measures a shifting state of mind rather than a fixed diagnosis.
Conceived in 2022 and slowly refined through rewrites, revisions, and meticulous synthesis work, Day Hospital moves with the obsessive logic of someone rearranging their own memories in search of a pattern. Every sound seems handled repeatedly, filed and refiled until it catches the light at just the right angle. The album is steeped in the sound culture of St. Petersburg and Moscow: heavy, shadowed low-end; stark rhythmic grids; a taste for metallic resonance and concrete ambience that echoes the architecture and industrial remnants of the post-Soviet city. Post-industrial aesthetics here are not retro styling but a lived backdrop - the sense of concrete, rust, and neon smearing together outside the window while the music tightens its spiral indoors. Across the record, the tracks hold a productive tension between functional propulsion and abstract sound design, as if every potential dancefloor moment had to pass first through a filter of introspection.
At its core, Day Hospital is a study in inner equilibrium, a sonic journey into the ways pressure and calm can coexist in the same bar. Copycat Department uses repetition as a diagnostic tool, testing how far a motif can be pushed before it fractures, how much distortion a texture can absorb before the underlying signal disappears. Beats may lock into persistent patterns, but the surfaces around them are in constant flux: filtered noise blooming and receding, spectral harmonies emerging out of the hiss, sudden absences that feel like skipped heartbeats. The music never indulges in melodrama; instead, it works toward a hard-won poise, a kind of electronic stoicism where tension is acknowledged and metabolised rather than theatrically exploded.
The album is produced in collaboration with Stadtkult and carries the imprint of a tightly controlled, solitary process. All tracks are produced and written by Aleksandr Chiesa, who also took charge of recording, mixing, and mastering, turning the project into a closed feedback loop of composition and sonic sculpture. That single-author focus is offset by a small visual community surrounding the release: DC96’s design, Wlad Wax’s photographs, and Fando’s booklet together expand the world of Day Hospital beyond the audio, sketching an aesthetic continuum from sound to image to text. Taken together, they frame the record as more than a collection of tracks - it is a self-contained ward, a temporary environment where the noise of the outside world is translated into pulse and texture, then fed back to the listener as a quietly intense, post-industrial meditation on fragility, persistence, and the strange clarity that sometimes arrives only when life is put on hold.
