But like Nick, she also faced similar reluctance while sat in front of a set of ebony and ivory keys. “Maybe I was lazy, maybe I was too rebellious,” she says. “As a child you can’t explain why you should be sitting there, playing piano and doing these stupid exercises that literally give pain to your fingers.”
Afterwards, she took a short stint in art school, where she formed a noise band with four other girls. With brash sounds and lyrics that called into question the world around them, there were early signs of the fingerprints that would later come to define IC3PEAK. “We were circumventing different toys and instruments, and playing noise – having fun,” she remembers. “It had social commentary, and was a feminist group, so it was a little bit less about the music, where you listen to it and think: ‘Wow, it’s beautiful.’ It was more of a statement.”
Such interrogation of surroundings via music always came naturally to Nastya, who as a young woman in the ’00s saw plenty to speak out about, and with the nascent days of the world wide web that stretched freely beyond borders, she had developed a language to articulate herself. “Even though Moscow is one of the most comfortable cities in Russia, it was weird,” she explains. “Especially as a girl sometimes, it was dangerous, and you were used to feeling small and powerless as a child and a teenager – the world seemed cruel, cold and uncaring. The internet shaped my attitude a lot, what I would read and watch, and I think I saw myself not as a Russian citizen, but a citizen of the internet.”
In the late ’00s, the pair attended dubstep
parties together, where both Nick and Nastya had their first electronic music epiphanies. Small capacity venues, deep, meditative wobs of sub bass, and a tight-knit underground community. At Nick’s first ever dubstep party, its promoters had flown over genre innovator and legendary label and party DMZ’s co-founder Coki, as well as BBC Radio 1 DJ and early dubstep platformer Mary Anne Hobbs.
“Dubstep was what actually started my intense focus on music,” Nick says. “It was pre-brostep and the energy was fucking insane – they played the Mr Vot remix of Major Lazer’s ‘Pon De Floor’ and it was crazy. It just has three instruments and worked so well on the soundsystem.”
