Ilya Efimov wasn’t born into a household of musicians. He grew up in a city of concrete and tramlines where music came to him like a secret radio station—snatches of street buskers, a neighbor practicing scales late at night, an old record of Latin guitar someone left at a flea market. The nylon guitar appealed to him because it spoke with human touch: fingers pressing, nails gliding, breath held between phrases. He taught himself thousands of small things—how to coax a sustained note from a soft attack, how to let a bass line imply rhythm without overpowering melody, how silence could be a dramatic instrument in its own right.