Kazakh-British artist Galya Bisengalieva returns this October with her second studio album for One Little Independent, Polygon and shares the video for the lead single Balapan today.Balapan is a facility at the Semipalatinsk site primarily used for underground explosions. “The track is full of off grid beats and warped, atonal harmony with the rhythms created on the violin” explains Galya. “It’s a sarcastic track that seems happy at first glance.

I was imagining people going to work constructing and building in a repetitive, cyclical motion and not really realising or being told what it was for or the impact it was going to bring. Balapan in Kazakh means chick, it’s what we call babies, and when I was growing up in Almaty we had a TV channel for toddlers called the same name; ironic for a place that wrought so much harm.”

Nico Sersale “The cinematographer Alex Grigoras and I spent a day experimenting with a glass top, a few syringes, some paint and a flask of ferrofluid – a black liquid that reacts to magnets. Our aim was to create a vast and mysterious landscape that evoked the nuclear test site of Balapan. Our little explosions of ferrofluid onto glass wanted to represent those devastating experiments that took place between 1949 and 1989 with little regard for their effect on the local people or environment.”