Raised in East Siberia, Russia, with Yılan (Elan clan) Bashqort roots, Stas draws on the duality of this heritage and approaches music as a site of tension, sifting through lived experience and inherited memory. This approach is bilateral: on one hand, studying how instrumental music, spoken literature, improvisation, and other communal traditions survived colonisation and genocide; on the other, meditating on how to resynthesise these practices and find ways to move beyond the exotic, essentialist, and nationalist frameworks they are often pushed into. Stas works in a wide range of media, including computer music, quray (a traditional Bashqort flute) improvisation, freeform composition, mixed-media installation, lecture-performances, and more.

In parallel to artistic work, Stas is the Associate Researcher at Basel’s Critical Media Lab, has been a guest lecturer at the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK FHNW in Basel and Sound Studies and Sonic Arts UdK, and is a doctoral candidate in Media Studies at the University of Basel. Their projects have been presented internationally, from CTM and transmediale to Manifesta 10, Kaserne Basel, Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Copenhagen, Zürich’s Rote Fabrik, Kunsthalle Basel, Biennale for Sound and Listening, Copernicus Science Centre in Warsaw, and many others.

• There Will Come Gentle Rain, by HMOT

• There Will Come Gentle Rain, by HMOT