About
Ruslan Khokhlachev
Ruslan Khokhlachev is a violinist, multi-instrumentalist, composer and arranger from Volgograd, Russia. The music he creates is mostly metal but he is absolutely open to play, arrange, and compose in any genre. Ruslan’s influences are classical music, prog metal, folk, electronic, microtonal and experimental music.
Ruslan was born on the 18th of October 1999 in the city of Volgograd, Russia. Both his parents are musicians, his mother is a singer and a violin teacher, and his father is a guitar teacher. Ruslan has been taught to play the violin by his mother since 2005. In 2011 he won his first international competition in Bulgaria. In 2015 he entered Central Music School in Moscow.
Beyond the education of a classical musician, he was always into rock and metal music. So he founded his one-man-project ProtoQuantonium in 2016 with the first single “The Prophecy of Maya”. The music of this project can generally be described as progressive power metal, although the songs are written in completely different metal subgenres. Even if this may not be your preferred style of music, you would most likely notice that the songs of ProtoQuantonium are very musically diverse.
In December of 2017 he performed in an orchestra with the Russian metal band Aria. Ruslan graduated from Central Music School in 2019 and in the same year entered Berklee College of Music. In 2020 Ruslan participated in the album recordings of Escalada and Arktida, two Russian metal bands.
In the same year he recorded a few of his own metal arrangements of some classical pieces for violin
by Wieniawski and Paganini.
In 2021 he organized an international project - “Violin Metal Shred Collab”. It was the first such collaboration video in the world, and it was released in January of 2022.
Education
2019-2024
Bachelor of Music
Berklee College of Music,
Boston
In 2019, he enrolled at Berklee College of Music in Boston, USA, where he continued his studies in violin performance with Rob Thomas. At Berklee, Ruslan studied many modern musical trends and actively took part in all kinds of sessions and projects. He recorded the violin part in Nikolai Mishchenko's composition 'Soul Whisper', was a violinist and guitarist in Olga Popova's debut album 'Pistolet Weina', played in the metal band Ali Tahir's THICC Orchestra. During his studies, he also began running a YouTube channel with adaptations of classical music in rock style. In May of 2024, he graduated from Berklee majoring in Contemporary Writing & Production.
2015-2019
Secondary Special Education
Central Music School, Moscow
Since 2015 to 2019 he studied at the CMS (Central Music School at the Moscow State Conservatory named after P.I. Tchaikovsky). For the first two years, Ruslan studied violin with Asya Kushner. After she passed away in September 2017, he transferred to Sergei Kravchenko’s class. Both professors are students of the famous Soviet violinist Leonid Kogan.
In parallel with his studies at the Central Music School, Ruslan creates the one-man project Protoquantonium, where he occasionally integrates the violin into metal. He was also a vocalist, violinist and arranger in the local ensemble AERTON. In December 2017, he performed with the famous Russian group Aria. In the fall of 2018, Ruslan took silver at a competition in Dubai.
2006-2013
Primary Music Education
Children's Music School, Volgograd
Since 2006 to 2013 he studied violin in Volgograd at children's music school No. 13. His teacher was his own mother, who teaches there. Starting from the 4th grade, he began to take an active part in numerous concerts and competitions, where he took the highest places.