One of the first well-recorded underground albums in 1981 was The Blue Album by Aquarium.

Recording Process

Boris Grebenshikov*:

Back in the summer of ’80, this guy named Andrey Tropillo showed up out of the blue and said, “I’ll help you.”

The first sign of that help was a homemade mixing console in a rough wooden box, which he brought to Gakkel’s apartment — the only place available to store it. It was a promising start—the console looked like some kind of guerrilla sabotage equipment.

By late autumn, Tropillo had somehow convinced the old guard at the Young Technician’s Club in Okhta that we were “pioneers,” and he led us inside. He led the sound-recording workshop there. It felt like a momentous occasion — there were fanfares and a choir singing — a new era had begun.

Once we got into the studio, we tried recording “Marina” and “-30,” but by then, the heavy, electric Aquarium era was over. Our drummer from Tbilisi, Zhenya Guberman, and the avant-gardist Sasha Alexandrov (also known as Fagot) had sort of drifted apart. The aquarium was back to its original quartet: Dyusha, Feinstein, Gakkel, and me.

We stopped trying to be “professional,” got comfortable in the studio, and started recording what we enjoyed most — new material no one had ever heard.

“Railroad Water” was written on a train between Leningrad and Solnechnoye. In Solnechnoye, we managed to rent a room with a stove for the whole winter because there was no housing to be found in the city. The “Red Devil,” who’d moved to Leningrad for a bit, played the harmonica and kept the proper degree of chaos alive. Tropillo worked tirelessly — ten hours a day, sometimes thirty when needed.

I was surprised when Dyusha took on the electric guitar role, recording solos for “Electric Dog” and his own “Strange Objects.” This made the album more than just a collection of songs — it became something alive and breathing. Meanwhile, Mikhail was getting the hang of percussion. I think it was around this time that he figured out that if you filled an empty beer can with a mix of certain grains and sealed it with tape, you’d get a shaker that sounded great and looked surprisingly “pro.”

Seva was pretty sick for most of the sessions, but he still managed to bring a lot of psychedelia to “The Plane.” He played while we fought over who got to use the studio’s only effects unit. That gadget ended up shaping a lot of our future recordings and the early albums of Kino.

This was basically the first legit underground Russian album: the songs were recorded in a real studio, arranged in a deliberate order, and the cover photo was glued by hand with “Moment” adhesive onto boxes wrapped in blue paper. Aquarium started as a band of idealistic wanderers, and it became something real — a true myth.

Cover Art

“The album was called Blue, and that’s about it,” Andrey Usov says. “It wasn’t about the music itself, which I thought was great. I liked how random it was. Think of the Beatles’ compilations — the Red Album and the Blue Album, with the Please Please Me cover photo. The edges of the cardboard box that held the tape reel were wrapped in blue paper, and a photograph was glued on top.”

The cover shows the band members looking up from below, and inside, they’re walking up a staircase. On the back, they’ve “fallen down” and are lying on the ground.

Back then, blank tape reels came in two types. The cheaper ones were just reels in a plain box. There were also fancier versions with a flip-top box that opened like a book, revealing the tape inside. Usov says, “The flip-top design let me make four panels instead of just two.” “The first panel — the back — always had to list the track titles. But with four sides to work with and a vivid imagination, Boris [Grebenshchikov] and I came up with ideas for all of them.”

Full Album

Tracklist

This Side

That Side

Original reel tape artwork

Black and white album cover of Soviet rock band Aquarium with band members in a stairwell, iconic in Soviet rock history.

* From memoirs «A brief report on 16 years of sound recording», 1996

Andrey Usov’s interview © Artur Netsvetaev

Reel Tape artwork from Discogs