"Total in-the-red, bristling at the edges, visceral droning horror. Haunting shit." - Tiny Mix Tapes

"[Timofeev] traffics in expanses of layered drones, and looped riffage, of atmospheres and ambience, but active ambience, with sounds blurred and tangled, rhythmic without actual rhythms." - Aquarius Records

"The sort of track that broods malevolently, but is totally hypnotic and mesmerizing" - Boing Boing

"Difficult at first, the tracks here will reveal themselves as deep and mysterious, the harshness cloaked in a sheen of soft melody adding an alien beauty to proceedings." - Terrascope

"Viktor Timofeev is probably better known as a visual artist, this NYC resident hails from Latvia, and has been making a name for himself in the art world, but he also counts himself a sometime member of electro synth-wave downer poppers Nihiti, and painted the very distinctive cover of the first Nihiti, his solo record is something totally removed from Nihiti, on his own, he instead traffics in expanses of layered drones, and looped riffage, of atmospheres and ambience, but active ambience - sounds blurred and tangled, rhythmic without actual rhythms, the label drops names like Stars Of The Lid, SUNNO))) and Godspeed, and we do definitely hear elements of all of those, it's droney and dirgey and haunting and almost classical sounding in places, but the tracks are super varied, while retaining an oblique cohesiveness, the opener is all dirgey blackened atmospherics, reminding us a little of Blackwolfgoat, looped and layered riffage, lurching and stuttering but super hypnotic, ultra lo-fi, muddy and murky, but the sort of thing we would have been into seeing fill up both sides of the record.
The second track is totally different, instead it's lush and shimmery, a dreamlike dronescape laced with streaks of feedback and a haunting distorted melody that runs throughout. The final track on the A side begins with field recordings, birds and running water, all beneath a series of warped and woozy tape experiments, lush chordal swells, repetitive and mantra-like, finally transforming into an almost orchestral looped industrial outro. The flipside is separated into three tracks, but they seem to be woven into one sidelong epic, a cinematic symphonic landscape of drone and melody that almost sounds like a black metal Arvo Part, droney and dirgery and dramatic, sinister and ominous, the vibe menacing and super intense, the sort of track that broods malevolently, but is totally hypnotic and mesmerizing, the whole side is like a sonic black hole, the listener immersed in the dense deep blackness, until the last few minutes, where the track finishes off with a strange bloopy almost new wavey sounding outro. Definitely recommended for fans of dark drones and droney darkness, and for sure has us wanting to hear more sounds, and see more art from Timofeev." - Aquarius Records

"Timofeev mostly transcends the major/minor duality and dives into bleak, yet very addictive walls of sound. Like Nihiti, Timofeev uses a wide range of instruments toward the production of rich atmosopheres, though all varieties of beat-oriented percussion are absent. The emphasis here is on the building of layers that don’t use much percussive delineation—postrock sounds serve as a brief jumping-off point, but most of the album trends closer to drone music, alternating focal points between distorted guitars, voices, synths, and found sound/field recordings/samples. The opening and closing tracks are heaviest with guitars, accompanied by some distant piano stabs in the opening “December 22nd,” and blended more evenly with oscillating frequencies in the closing “July 28th. ” In between, my favorite two tracks are the longest: both of them build slowly to nightmarish, oppressive walls of sound and slowly thin out again. There are some legitimate, though still very dark, melodies played on clarinets in the 14-minute “Flying Zonogons,” which are gradually stacked upon themselves through overdubs and heavy reverb. Voices are used over sounds of moving water in a similar overdubbed, reverbed, and delayed fashion to create the center portion of “WorldWideWaterWorld,” eventually adding a ring modulator or similar filter that obliterates pitch into metallic densities that rise and fall with the pauses in the vocal overdubs. I really enjoyed the less-effected vocal buildups comprising “1. 1. 1. 1. ,” too, which evoke some of the best moments in modern choral writing like that of Gorecki or the micropolyphony of Ligeti. It’s this blend of modern classical, drone, and guitar noise approaches that impresses me more with each listen. I’m captivated by it now, and I suspect this music will continue to reveal more of itself with time." - Killed In Cars

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Viktor Timofeev’s personal journey into the outer reaches of sonic experimentation has been a unique and intensely personal one, complimentary to but distinct from his work as a visual artist. Hailing from Latvia originally, coming up in New York City, and for the last several years residing in Berlin, the stamp of “Eastern” modal melodies can be found all over the vast soundscapes GIVE HEALTH999 offers, though these modes have been so fractured and distorted that the exact reasons for that impression can be hard to pin down.

Working primarily with simple recording technologies and using guitar/bass/analog effects as the primary audio source, tracks like Eden_Olymp|a (thematically based on the edenic resort from J.G. Ballard’s “Super Cannes”) begin with a jarring cacophony of broken delay pedals before emerging into searing sonic fires reminiscent of nothing so much as a meteorite burning up on re-entry to the atmosphere of some distant moon. Flying Zonogons, the album’s centerpiece, languorously builds a layered wall of dread over its fifteen minute length; were it to have been a Brian Eno recording, it would surely be the darkest one in his catalog.

At it’s most abstractly beautiful, GIVE HEALTH999 brings to mind the more “out” work of Stars of the Lid or even Godspeed! You Black Emperor, although considerably darker and more experimentally diffuse than either. The dark edges hint at the influence of atmospheric black metal bands like Burzum or the out and out noise/heaviness abstractions of Sunn O))) or NON, though the melodic sensibility gives the music a dramatically epic flair very rarely seen in such intentionally “out” music.