ABOUT
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Nikolai Kolpakov
Multi-instrumentalist musician working with Persian santur, frame drums, didgeridoo, various percussion, and electronic devices.
Explores ethno-fusion, ambient, drone, and noise, and creates music for mysteries, rituals, and meditation. Produces immersive sound journeys and vibration-based sound ceremonies, designs sound for video, and supports practices and ceremonies with live music, holding the ritual space through sound.
Nickolay has been playing percussion since 2008. He began with djembe, studying with a Congolese tradition bearer. Later, he trained with musicians from Middle Eastern musical traditions (Armenia, Georgia, Turkey), attending and performing at Sufi sama rituals.
He continues to study the theory and practice of different traditions, working with teachers and collaborating with other musicians. He also plays the Persian santur, a hammered string instrument from the dulcimer family. Alongside music, he has practiced meditation for many years and is a tea master, bringing a grounded, calm presence into the spaces he enters. Since 2020, he has been studying Vedic astrology (Jyotish).
He regularly performs at Russian and international festivals: solo as Nickolay Kolpakov and BDDH13, and as part of the projects Embara, Bhramari, and WHIRLING FAMILY.
BDDH13 is a shorthand: “Buddah/Buddha” plus 13, my favourite lucky number. Together it points to a simple Buddhist idea: each of us carries a Buddha nature, already present within. It started as an old forum nickname, and when I moved deeper into electronic music, I chose it as the name of the project, like a serial number for something living in a world full of endless “products”.
BDDH13 is an electro-acoustic project about meditative states, inner immersion, and contemplation, about what appears on the “screen” of consciousness during meditation: the full range of thoughts and feelings, sometimes dense, sometimes quiet, and sometimes dissolving into a blissful silence.
“Life is both short and long at the same time, filled with countless events and experiences. Niko, as a musician-artist, guides the soul through the space of being along the path itself, finely attuned to the flowing song of time, the world, and the divine within.
His music calms the restless ripples of the mind, and inner vision becomes so clear that nothing remains but to merge with this moment and with all phenomena as one, beyond life and death.
The Persian santur is one of the most ancient instruments, the most beautiful I have ever encountered. Its voice, and Nikolay’s mastery, feel alive, like a breath of the sacred, approaching that kind of perfection where the edges and patterns of all life paths meet and dissolve.
This music can heal a person.”
© Inaya Ta, performance artist, founder of SAMO Art Group