KNDR is the latest alter-ego of Kirill Burenkov. a multidisciplinary & holistic artist whose creative journey began with songwriting in 2009.

The visual philosophy you see emerges from lived experience: born in Tallinn, Estonia to a stoic Soviet engineer father and an emotional full-time mother. i grew up happy and free. i went to an Estonian kindergarten and started learning English a year after that, so by the time school came around i felt pretty comfortable speaking three languages. alas, i had only a single year of schooling in Tallinn, because my father go a 4-year contract in London where we moved to in 2000.

I was not a fan of life in London. The fall from being who you are and liked for it to becoming the strange Russian kid — was a painful one. the five years i spent in London were lonely and school (especially the two years of secondary school) was synonymous with being bullied. needless to say that when my father got his contract prolonged i felt betrayed, because these four years i had been dreaming about returning home. after one unsanctioned year i gave my parents an ultimatum: i am returning to Tallinn. unfortunately we had no family there and i was only 13. we agreed on me moving to live with my mum’s twin sister in

everything changed again. mind you, i spoke Russian fluently, but i never really learned to read or write in it. so while everyone in class was wrapping their heads around the new subject of chemistry, i was reading like a five year old. the four years i spent in Lipetsk played a huge part on who i have become as did my aunt. it was both a great time - no bullying and i had friends again, and a very difficult time because of all the after-school lessons i attended to catch up to my peers.

then something beautiful happened in the spring of my last year of high school. on my was to yet another tutor, i started singing words that formed into a melody. -was is a regurgitated Nirvana-esque banality? -yes! -was it one of the best moments of my life? -also yes. from that moment on i knew that i am a writer of songs. snippets of some the first melodies still live in me today. i articulated that i want to be a musician to my mother, but due to severe miscommunication within our family i ended up in a maritime academy in St. Petersburg studying logistics, wearing a uniform and miserable. but all shitclouds have a silver lining and for me it’s the friendships i still hold dear to this day. oh, and i absolutely didn’t finish my first education and dropped out in year 4 out of 5.

i had just turned 21, i had amazing friends, i was still writing songs and had even recorded my first studio demo, so despite the shitty scenery i was pursuing my own thing and the cast had drastically improved. my privileged middle-class ass retreated to London to spend some time figuring out what to do now. the choices were: acting, music, psychology and philosophy. funnily enough, the first to go was music. i was scared to start studying it in a university, because i didn’t have a musical education and chose to drop reading notes for chords way back when. acting requires good memory skills and those were never my forte. the Know Thyself Coursera course made me realise that i want to study philosophy, so that i can write better, deeper lyrics.

i nearly died form peritonitis that August, so starting uni in London quite a literal new life. apart from the whole recovery process i was living the life, studying philosophy, helping school kids on campus with maths homework, creating complicated alliances in Monopoly, writing tunes in my dorm which was 7 seconds away from where almost all our lectures occurred and i had found amazing people with whom we participated in a Russian sketch comedy gig know as the Klub of the Witty and fuN (KVN). a truly great year and a new start for me.

to be cont…