Kate NV was in a rut at the start of 2019. The Russian artist had spent half of the previous year on tour behind her experimental electronic album для FOR, hunched over her synthesizers as she improvised brand new music for every show. During a residency at Stockholm’s Elektronmusikstudion (EMS), she struggled with the studio’s famed Buchla synthesizer, trying to turn its precisely engineered outputs into something that sounded more human. Then something clicked: “This makes no sense,” she realized. “It was invented for the sake of doing the opposite thing.”⁠ ⁠ NV left Russia when the war began, and this distance is on her mind as she talks about Room for the Moon Live, released last month, five years after the original. Recorded at one of the only three shows the group ever performed, its story is bittersweet: On one hand, it’s the consummate live album, encapsulating both the precision of the original project and the interplay of a band in peak form, improvising in perfect synchrony ...