Feel Zem, Май and a Decade of Moscow Mixcloud Mixes, Explained
A Moscow Designer Turns Falling Trees and Frost Into a Five-Track Glitch-Ambient EP
Twelve and a half degrees below zero is the reading in the title of Май, -12.5 ℃. It is the fourth of five tracks on Май, the 21-minute EP Feel Zem released on 1 May 2026. The Moscow producer files it under glitch-ambient, IDM and leftfield. Falling trees and crunching snow went into it, turned towards the optimism of May.
Feel Zem’s Май, -12.5 ℃ is in the playlist below, among this desk’s late-night downtempo picks, and the project’s coverage sits on the Feel Zem artist profile. Май reached ElectronicMusic.News through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news titles. Press play on it, then read on for the Moscow scene the EP comes from.
Moscow’s Leftfield Electronic Wave Reached Feel Zem Through the Forza and Lёt Mix Series Before Май
Feel Zem was a selector for eight years before releasing a track. On Mixcloud, the Moscow graphic and web designer still calls themselves a beginning musician. The first mix series there, Forza, started in September 2012. In June 2014 it gave way to a second series, Lёt, which ran to Lёt № 27 in October 2021.
The tags on those uploads trace the wave the producer was following. The early Forza mixes carry the tags eclectic, Balearic and retro. By 2017 and 2018, the Lёt editions read indie dance, nu disco and post-dubstep. By 2020 they had moved to electronica, beats and IDM.
The running orders show the same shift. Lёt № 23, uploaded in July 2020, opens with two Moscow producers, Kedr Livanskiy and Mujuice. From there it moves through Underworld, Caribou, Bicep, Fred again.. and Jamie xx. Meanwhile, Four Tet turns up twice across the Lёt lists, remixing Caribou’s Never Come Back and Foals’ Balloons. That is the wave in miniature. UK and Canadian producers bring leftfield electronics into the club, programmed next to artists from Feel Zem’s own city.
Feel Zem put Sexy Monday, released 19 days earlier, fifth in that running order. It sits between Tourist & The Range and the Four Tet remix of Never Come Back. That slot asks a brand-new track to hold its own in strong company.
From Sexy Monday to Soviett Lenivo, a Selector Becomes a Producer
The releases began on May Day 2020 with On/On On/On (Take 2), filed as ambient. Sexy Monday followed in July, filed as techno, and Auuuroom arrived that December. In 2021 came Nine & Exercice and the five-track Some Anxious Ones EP, both listed as IDM and experimental. Then, in September 2022, the four-track Пусть ≈ Lёt EP carried the name of the mix series into the catalogue. Its title track grew out of a wish, пусть, meaning may it be so.
After that came a label. Between January 2023 and February 2025, Feel Zem released four records through Soviett Lenivo. They were воды + скифы, the Формы and Влияние EPs and the single Bolero. The label also runs the Lenivo. Soviett Chill compilation series, which reached Part 11 in March 2022. Nightdrive, Sayana and Alexander Tishkov are among its regulars.
Май Takes Feel Zem Back to Self-Release With Five Glitch-Ambient Tracks Named for Frost and Berries
Май arrived six years to the day after On/On On/On (Take 2). This time the copyright line is Feel Zem’s own rather than the label’s. A video for Dzɛm, posted at the end of March, announced the five compositions five weeks early. Dzɛm opens the EP at 5:36 and is the longest of the five. Next comes μ-ягоды at 3:49, then Сотнядней, the shortest at 2:57. Its title is the Russian for a hundred days, run together as one word. The fourth track, the one with the temperature in its title, runs 5:03. Finally, Abbastanza acido, Italian for acid enough, closes at 4:06.
The writing is credited plainly. On that fourth track, the Spotify credits name Filipp Zemlyanukhin as composer and on keyboards. Feel Zem takes the producer credit. The alias is a shorter stand-in for that Russian name, which the producer spells phonetically as fiːl dzɛm. In other words, the opener Dzɛm carries half of the name. Nobody else appears in the credits, and the EP carries an instrumental tag.
Frost, Hope and a South Park Joke Shape the Five Tracks of Май
Feel Zem has written that the aim was to pull the sounds and vibrations the producer loves into one whole. The idea was to recast falling timber and snow underfoot as romance. It also sets the sun of a frozen day against the warmth of hope. May at twelve and a half below zero is therefore not a weather report. Instead, it puts both halves of that idea, frost and hope, into one title.
One track carries a joke. When its first riff came together, Feel Zem could almost hear South Park’s Member Berries. Those are the 2016 characters who ask ‘Member? until someone answers. The berries in μ-ягоды, ягоды being Russian for berries, point to which track it is. Around it, the five tracks make a spacious, nocturnal glitch-ambient EP.
From the ElectronicMusic.News curator team: “We placed Май, -12.5 ℃ fourth in our downtempo playlist, straight after Bonobo’s Terrapin and Thievery Corporation’s Lebanese Blonde. Next to two downtempo staples, it is the coldest title in the room. It is also the track we would hand to anyone who knows those names but has never heard a Moscow leftfield producer.”
Mujuice, Kedr Livanskiy and Boards of Canada Sit Closest to Май
Three acts help place Май for anyone meeting Feel Zem for the first time.
Mujuice is the closest parallel in Moscow. Roman Litvinov graduated in graphic design in 2006. He then built a career mixing techno, IDM and glitch with pop and jazz. His 2011 album Downshifting marked a turning point. Feel Zem, another designer, played Mujuice’s Underground second in Lёt № 23.
Kedr Livanskiy shows the route out of the city. Yana Kedrina posted her first tracks on SoundCloud and then signed to the New Jersey label 2MR. Her January Sun EP followed in 2016. Her Ivan Kupala, named after the Slavic midsummer festival, opens that same Lёt mix. Likewise, Май takes its name from a point in the year.
Boards of Canada are the long view. The Scottish brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin released Music Has the Right to Children on Warp in 1998. Their records draw on the sound of 1970s public broadcasting. They became a reference point for electronic music about memory. A riff that begins as a nostalgia joke, as μ-ягоды does, belongs to that tradition.
Play Май in order first, because the producer made it to be heard as a single whole. Then go back to Some Anxious Ones and Пусть ≈ Lёt for the IDM records it grew from. After that, the Lёt mixes show the ear behind them.
Follow Feel Zem on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, YouTube Music, SoundCloud, Bandcamp, Deezer, Tidal, Yandex Music, Mixcloud, Instagram, Facebook and VK. Stream Май on Spotify, Apple Music, Bandcamp and Deezer. Every store is also on its BandLink page, and the rest of the producer’s links sit on Taplink.
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