This text is meant as extracurricular reading for those who listen to Aquarium and—for whatever reason—want to know how what they’re hearing was recorded. It is by no means “memoirs,” “recollections,” or even a “literary work.” At best, it’s entertainment for specialists; at worst, it’s just our own self-indulgence—and, strictly speaking, it makes no sense at all. Perhaps that’s exactly why it came into being: true creativity, as I once heard, has neither reason nor meaning. It simply grows—like trees.

The chronicle begins in 1980, because what came before was a time of unformed mythology: wandering through the engineering castles of this world with a guitar, a flute, and a cello. It was a period never really captured and impossible to reflect adequately. The recordings from those years belong less to musicology than to ethnography—they are documents of another form of life. In other words, they can be studied, but not listened to. Back then, the value of music lay not in being heard, but in being played.

Our appearance at the Tallinn festival, and the acquaintances that followed—first with Mashina Vremeni, later with Artemy Troitsky—led to the Tbilisi concert and the start of another phase of life. That is where this story truly begins.

I should add that I grew up listening to records and radio, and of course rock ’n’ roll was, for me, a magical combination of sounds emerging from a loudspeaker. It was a purely religious revelation—like the burning bush—that forever erased the bland world of my parents, or rather, my bland perception of it. There were no living beings—no musicians—hidden behind it. Poorly duplicated photographs of the Beatles, traded in the schoolyard during recess, had only a theoretical connection to the miracle that resurrected the dead in I Want To Hold Your Hand.

That’s why our attempts to create something that could be listened to as a recording began long before we learned to hold the guitar the right way around. The Temptation of St. Aquarium, recorded in 1973, is a direct illustration of this. Later came The Parables of Count Diffusor and others—but these still fell far short of what we longed for. We rehearsed, wrote songs, played concerts, and—without realizing it—were simply waiting for a miracle…

The Blue Album

In the summer of 1980, out of nowhere appeared a vaguely familiar figure named Andrei Tropillo, who said, “I’ll help you.”

The first sign of that help was a homemade mixing console in a rough wooden box, which he hauled into Sewa’s apartment (since there was nowhere else to store it). An auspicious beginning—the thing looked more like a partisan bomb than a piece of studio gear.

By late autumn, Tropillo had hypnotically convinced the old lady at the entrance desk that we were “pioneers” and smuggled us into the Young Technicians’ Club on the Okhta, where he ran the tape-recording workshop. Fanfares played, a choir of illegal angels sang—it was the dawn of a New Era.

Once we had access to the studio, we first tried to record Marina and –30, but by then the era of heavy-electric Aquarium had probably passed. Our Tbilisi-period drummer Zhenya Guberman and mystical avant-gardist Sasha Aleksandrov (Fagot) had vanished into thin air, and Aquarium reverted to its original quartet: Dyusha, Feinstein, Gakkel, and me. We spat on “professionalism,” sat down in the studio, and began recording what was simply the most fun to record—new songs that no one had ever heard.

Railway Water was written on the Leningrad–Solnechnoye train (in Solnechnoye we managed to rent a stove-heated room for the whole winter—there was no housing in the city). Ryzhy Chort, temporarily migrated to Leningrad, blew his harmonica and kept the anarchy at proper levels. Tropillo worked selflessly ten, sometimes thirty hours at a stretch. To my surprise, Dyusha took up the role of electric guitarist, laying down the solo on The Dog and his own Strange Objects, which turned the record from a collection of songs into a living being.

Mikhail was just then mastering percussion (I think it was around this time he discovered that if you filled an empty beer can with a mix of grains and sealed it with a band-aid, you had yourself a surprisingly good-sounding—and rather stylish—shaker). Sewa, though ill for most of the sessions, still managed to inject a hefty dose of psychedelia into The Plane. He played while the rest of us fought for the chance to twist the knobs of the studio’s lone effects unit—an effect that would play no small role in our later recordings and in the first albums of Kino.

In truth, this was the first proper underground Russian album: the songs were recorded in a studio, arranged in order, and the photo cover was glued by hand with “Moment” adhesive onto boxes wrapped in blue paper. Out of a band of idealistic wanderers, Aquarium became real—and therefore, a true myth.

The Triangle

When you want something—not consciously, but with your whole being—it comes true. In the spring and summer of 1981, in a studio that quite literally fell from the sky into our laps, we recorded what I had always loved most: an album of pure, irresponsible absurdity.

Half the songs were written on the tram on the way to the studio, then rehearsed and arranged on the steps of the Young Technicians’ Club while we waited for the sound engineer, who was famous for being hours late. To his credit, he treated our nonsense with total professionalism, even played recorder on Misha, and respected our uncompromising devotion to the illogical. In The Triangle (as it became known—the actual “title” was just the symbol, never spoken aloud), the level of group creativity was unusually high. Everyone seemed to be tuned to the same frequency.

It was on The Triangle that Aquarium first met Sergei Kuryokhin. A friend had suggested inviting him to raise our musical and arranging level—a wise idea. The Captain came, happily sprinkled his keyboard brilliance across the songs, made everyone play kazoo on The Lieutenant, and then stayed with us for years, drifting in and out. Much of Aquarium simply wouldn’t have happened without him.

We already knew Olga Pershina (later Perry—what she goes by now, I don’t know) from Vasin’s Beatles’ Birthdays. I can’t remember why we invited her, but she showed up—and not only sang backing vocals, but contributed as a composer (Two Tractor Drivers). Even Sewa, against his usual habits, sang a solo. Sadly, the original recording of Crookedness—sung by Dyusha in the style of Ernst Busch—was lost. Later it slowly morphed into the album version, while I sat in a side room working on Count Garcia.

I carried this masterpiece to Moscow with a trembling heart—only to be told unanimously by the experts that nobody would ever listen to it. History proved them wrong: 85% of Russia came to love Aquarium precisely because of The Triangle. Since then, I’ve learned to take critical judgments with a smile.

Electricity

The first side—the live side—was recorded at a concert in the circus of the town of Gori (incidentally, Stalin’s birthplace), held as part of the unforgettable Tbilisi-80. At first we were banned from the festival completely; then, for reasons unknown, they suddenly asked us to play in Gori. By then we were already black sheep with nothing to lose, so we decided to have the time of our lives.

On keyboards was Latvian composer Mārtiņš Brauns from the sympathetic band Sipoli (together, they and we formed the “punk” faction in Tbilisi, for which Aquarium was crowned in one Finnish newspaper as the “godfathers of Soviet punk”). During The Blues of the Pig in the Ears, Dima “Ryzhy Chort” Gusev appeared in the circus arena with his harmonica, and drummer Guberman was suddenly joined by Michael Kordyukov, who came down from the mountains out of nowhere.

The concert was filmed by the Finns, and the audio track was secretly copied in Moscow thanks to a friendly Chilean cameraman. Eternal gratitude to him—and to all of them.

The studio side was recorded at Tropillo’s, during the peak of our reggae & dub experiments. From Tropillo’s legendary effects unit we squeezed far more than it was ever designed to produce. Unfortunately, songs like The Amateur we had no idea how to put on tape properly (the same problem would soon repeat with Rock ’n’ Roll Is Dead). On a couple of tracks, guitarist Volodya Kozlov (Union of Rock Music Lovers—you can also hear him on Lieutenant Ivanov from The Triangle) lent us a hand. This was because The Triangle, Acoustics, and Electricity were all being recorded at the same time, and which song we worked on depended entirely on our mood that day.

On drums (everywhere except The Wonderful Amateur) was Alexander Kondrashkin, whom we’d first heard at some jazz-avant-garde concert and happily invited to play with us. For a while we even rehearsed at his place. Rehearsals shaped much of Aquarium’s signature sound. Since we never had a proper space for electric rehearsals, we would gather at someone’s apartment; the bass was usually plugged into a radio (sometimes even into a TV—since, alas, bass amps were rare), and drums were replaced with whatever household items were handy. Naturally, rehearsals quickly turned into tea-drinking sessions and wide-ranging philosophical debates. If anyone managed to remember the chord changes of a song, they kept it to themselves. As a result, the band was never very tight—but it was always close-knit. That’s how Aquarium as a way of life became a professional reality.

And I note with some irony: that’s still how it works today. Modern Western science is powerless to explain this anomaly. But, as Mike rightly observed, you can’t fight karma.

Taboo

At last we decided to record a proper electric album—the songs we were actually playing live. Early ’82 was marked by the first concert of a truly electric Aquarium with Lyapin and Pyotr (the recording of that show has since been released as Aroks and Shter). For a time, we were even granted official permission to perform, which meant the concert season had opened. But that didn’t stop us from recording.

Lacking proper keyboards, we hammered office tacks into the hammers of a piano. Here—as in much of Radio Africa—the arrangements, and to some extent the choice of musicians, owed a great deal to Sergei Kuryokhin. Working with him was never really “work,” but sheer pleasure. Around the same time, we recorded Exercises with Vladimir Chekasin and our own Subway Culture. I think the rest of Aquarium were a little uneasy about this alliance—but what could they do?

Kuryokhin frowned at Lyapin’s “too straight-up rock” guitar; Lyapin, for his part, would have happily played louder, longer, and with less piano clatter. As for me—like the cartoon cat Leopold—I just wanted everyone to live in peace, and above all, for the album to come out fantastically well. More than once I had to escape the studio tensions out onto the balcony—where, during the Taboo sessions, I ended up writing Rock ’n’ Roll Is Dead. But when that strange combination clicked (and in truth, both of them respected each other’s musicianship deeply), it worked 100 percent.

It’s a pity the tape ran out during the recording of Sons of Silent Days—that was the only thing that stopped us. And of course, to balance the whole picture, Taboo closes with a Tolkien-inspired coda: Radamaerl.

Acoustics

This album captures the songs Aquarium played at acoustic home concerts between 1978 and 1986. At the concerts, of course, they sounded much more immediate and raw—but on tape, each song uses only the instruments it really needs.

At the shows, everyone always played at once, creating that cheerful chaos so typical of Aquarium at the time. The recordings themselves were made in parallel with The Triangle and Electricity during the spring, summer, and fall of 1981. A few tracks, though, were recorded earlier, during Tropillo’s first heroic attempt to record Aquarium in the very heart of the enemy—right inside Melodiya (Ivanov and others).

Thus the guiding principle of Aquarium was set for years to come: if there’s a studio, the best use of time is simply to spend all your free hours there, and something interesting will happen on its own. In fact, most of our best recordings were always made outside of any “official work,” purely for fun. Unconceptual, as some might call it.

Radio Africa

Two summers had already gone by with our mass night-time bike rides around the then-popular resort town of Solnechnoye (see The Music of Silver Spokes). That’s the spirit in which the album began—first at our beloved Young Technicians’ Club, and then, somehow, Tropillo managed to cut a deal for us to use an MCI recording truck that had come to the Philharmonic. At night, hiding from the watchful eyes of the police suspiciously observing the truck from across the street, we slipped into our very first 16-track studio and brought our dreams to life. And the dream was to make a full-blooded, richly varied, positive record. Which is exactly what happened.

Here were Kuryokhin and Igor Butman with their jazz, our take on reggae, reversed guitars and drums, a choir of Shaolin monks, and Lyapin—finally on the same wavelength with us. Altogether it created just the effect we had hoped for.

All sorts of people had a hand in recording Africa: Michael Kordyukov (Moon Time, The Snake, Morning Snow), Zhenya Guberman (Captain Africa), Grinya (Alexander Grishchenko, the bassist Kuryokhin had brought in during the Tabooperiod—hear him on The Art of Being Humble). Lyapin’s then-wife Lilia sang backing vocals on Boy Yevgraf. Sewa played bass on both Boy Yevgraf and Vana Hoya. Even Grisha Sollogub of Strange Games showed up to record harmonica for Vana Hoya—but the harp clashed hopelessly with the track, and with heavy hearts we had to scrap it.

It was during Radio Africa that Tit appeared for the first time. When no one could manage to lay down a simple driving bassline for Moon Time, Dyusha remembered an old bassist acquaintance, tracked him down, and asked for help. Alexander walked quietly into the truck, listened to the track, and nailed the bass on the very first take. I was stunned—and started thinking.

Moon Time and Snow I wrote while sneaking home from work (at the time I was guarding the garage of some public baths, but at night I’d slip home to sleep). Boy Yevgraf was written in a taxi with Tsoi and Marianna—we were on our way to their place, late and carrying a sack of red wine, where Kuryokhin was already waiting.

When the recording was finished, we mixed it all night, wrapped up at ten in the morning, and drove off to Vyborg to play a festival. That’s where Tit received a formal invitation to join Aquarium—and enthusiastically agreed. To mark the occasion, everyone at the festival got drunk and spent the night skinny-dipping in the lakes and fjords of Monrepos Park (if I recall correctly, right in the center of Vyborg). As far as I remember, at that time it was practically comme il faut to walk around naked in public.

Ichthyology

At this point Aquarium had once again been strictly banned from public performance. Our collective response was to promise to play more concerts, and better ones. Blacklisted and unlicensed, we played in strangers’ apartments, which meant the instrumentation bordered on ascetic. (To be fair, the theater Litsedei wasn’t put off by our untouchable status and let us play a series of shows there—the second half of the album reflects that.)

The only way to record Fly, My Angel, Fly was live in concert—no studio microphone could withstand the cello storm that came with that song.

The Day of Silver

Strange as it may sound, the roots of Day of Silver partly go back to the composer Glinka. Film director Alexander Sokurov, a friend of ours at the time, suggested we record a few Glinka romances for one of his films (which never materialized). We were stunned and began to wrestle with the impossible task. Analyzing Glinka’s method of composition, I was floored by his harmonic freedom. “Aha,” I thought. “If he can do it, why can’t we?”

That spring, Sewa and I spent weeks at his place writing songs. I would come in with an idea, and he wouldn’t let me settle for the simplest version. Naturally, by the next meeting I wanted to bring something that would impress him—and he still wouldn’t let me rest on that either. In this back-and-forth, only what truly struck us both survived—and therefore stuck in memory. (Of course, nothing was ever written down.) Since our musical center of gravity was more or less in the same place, everything moved in the right direction.

When it came time to forge the arrangements, we needed a violinist, and Sewa soon met Sasha Kussul in Saigon [the Leningrad café, not Vietnam]. A better candidate was unimaginable. (There were rumors Sasha was Wagner’s great-grandson—I can’t say if that’s true, but I found him far preferable to any possible ancestor.) Work flowed, tea was endless. At the time, Kussul was simultaneously studying at the Conservatory, playing first violin in the Musical Comedy Theater orchestra, and performing at night along the Neva embankment—yet somehow he still had energy for full rehearsals with us.

There were also more personal, mystical factors that kept us restless: telepathic horses, flying saucers (we saw one right from my rooftop), not to mention the spirit of Peter III, who attacked us in the ruins of his palace (though, in fairness, we had no business going in there—Tropillo dragged us).

Musically, maybe not everything was 100% perfect, but to me this record and this album were the best Aquarium of the 1980s. With Day of Silver and Children of December, what we wanted was finally realized.

Children of December

A continuation of the idyll—the feeling that we could do anything. Kuryokhin rejoined the process, and the recording flowed like a song. Tolkien-like landscapes of Karelia, where I spent the summer (The Village); sheets of metal and an avant-garde detuned guitar (Thirst); a 10th-century Welsh bard, Gwyon ap Gwernach (Cad Goddeu)—all of it, and more, found its way into the album.

By Ino’s “technique of coincidences” [a reference to producer Ino’s improvisational philosophy], the flutes and choirs on Dreams appeared on tape by themselves—we were using un-erased reels from Melodiya [the Soviet state record label]—and, by chance, they fell perfectly into key and in exactly the right spots. At night everyone who could would gather at my place, plotting out what and how we’d record the next day.

The saxophones on 212 were played by Uncle Misha and Lyapin (the lower voice is actually Lyapin’s guitar, run through a guitar synthesizer). The authentic scream on She Can Move is Pyotr’s—his debut as a singer. He also gave us the Korg timbre on Underwater.

And if we’re talking about magic—though the less said about it, the more remains—the strings on The Village are its perfect example.

Ten Arrows

The studio went into renovation (as it turned out—forever), while the songs demanded immediate recording. (Maybe I’m wrong, but I’ve always believed that if a song is written, it’s written for today, and storing it away only robs it of its power.) So we had to record everything live at concerts. I still regret we never managed to capture it with harpsichords and sitars, as I had wanted. What we did have was plenty of violin from Sasha Kussul—to whose memory this album is dedicated.

It was, in fact, a fantastic lineup: an acoustic sextet sitting in a semicircle on stage, playing whatever came to mind. The wildest shifts in keys and tempos were no problem for such seasoned players. A good example is The Doors of Grass, usually performed in a completely different way; the version on the album is pure improvisation, something no one was prepared for, but everyone immediately joined in.

The way this lineup came together was just as unusual. After Day of Silver there was no regular concert band left (we were probably banned again), so we played semi-house concerts sometimes with Tit and Kussul, other times with Sewa, Dyusha, and Fan. For reasons long forgotten, these two factions never crossed paths. Then some of our old American friends—who for years had been hauling us sacks of Celtic records—decided to celebrate their wedding in St. Petersburg. For the occasion we agreed to play a concert with an unusually synthetic lineup—everyone together. We played, enjoyed it so much we didn’t want to stop, and immediately began performing in that lineup from then on (I suppose we had been unbanned again).

Equinox

The Young Technicians’ Club studio closed for good (someone finally informed the management that the “recording workshop” was being used by people who were very much not pioneers). The far-sighted Andrei Vladimirovich (Tropillo) had long since removed the master tapes of all the albums, made copies, cleverly disguised those copies as originals, and hidden them in places where, “just in case,” people would be sure to look. Where the real originals ended up—no one even asked.

For a year and a half we had nowhere to record, and only by blackmail did we manage to force Melodiya [the Soviet state record label] to give us studio time (a long but funny story). That’s how we first ended up in an official Soviet studio. The sound engineer treated us with unexpected warmth, but the result still came out heavy and cumbersome. It’s a pity, because the second side was supposed to be completely different; for specific reasons, three key songs were never finished, and their place was taken by Gold, Adelaide, and The Janitors’ Generation—fine songs, but clearly out of place on this album.

For The Tree we needed an accordion, so Gakkel brought in his old friend Sergei Shchurakov (then promptly left the studio halfway through the sessions). After Sasha Kussul’s death, there was a hole where the violin should have been. The new string section became Andrei “Ryusha” Reshetin and Vanya Voropaev—friends of Kussul’s who had once played with him, and for us that was recommendation enough.

The crumhorn orchestra and similar instruments we literally heard on the street and, without hesitation, invited into the studio.

After the haven of the Young Technicians’ Club, working in the citadel of Soviet music was a trial. It was strange to be in a place where everything seemed designed to show maximum disregard both for the musicians and for the people recording them—as if the whole process of recording was heavy labor for the glory of the Motherland (like plowing virgin lands or building the BAM railway), and therefore, by definition, not meant to be easy or pleasant. That invisible aura still hangs over all studios connected with Melodiya—though now it’s joined by the thin atmosphere of post-imperial poverty. But even so, we still somehow managed to enjoy ourselves.

Equinox was the swan song of Aquarium in the 1980s. By then, we no longer fit into one band—there were simply too many of us, with too many different interests and approaches. Sakmarov was right when he called Equinox a hymn. The time had come to move on. It was hard to say—to where. But, unknown to us, the trap was already about to spring.

Radio Silence

Dave and I were sitting by the pool at his house/studio in Los Angeles when he said: “No doubt some critic will write: Stewart ruined what could have been a fine folk-rock album.” He had no idea how right he was.

Russian critics dislike Radio Silence because:

a) it doesn’t sound like Aquarium,

b) it didn’t sweep the charts worldwide, thereby “proving” the supremacy of Soviet rock, and

c) it isn’t remotely “Mitki”-like [Mitki were a Leningrad bohemian art movement].

They’re right. As always, they didn’t understand a thing.

In fact, Radio Silence shattered the self-satisfied Aquarium that had been basking in its own success (since autumn ’86 we’d been moving from stadium to stadium, greeted with ovations as if we’d personally overthrown the Soviet government) and forced us to face the real world. Traditionally, Russia had always imagined for itself a mythical “West” (based on O. Henry, Dickens, and Françoise Sagan), populated it with “Germans,” and lived comfortably in the knowledge that our “Russian Soul” was deeper, higher, closer to God—something the “Germans” could never understand. Since childhood, though, I had preferred not to read fairy tales, but to live in them. That’s exactly what happened. On closer inspection it turned out the “Germans” were nothing but a product of Russian ignorance, the world was very small, and dividing it into “us” and “them” was simply suicidal.

I won’t recount the whole genesis of Radio Silence here; suffice it to say a mad New York inventor named Kenny Schaeffer decided to do battle with the dragon of Soviet power and—with a little help from his friends—brought it down. As a result, I may well have been the first free Russian abroad since 1917. But let’s get back to Aquarium.

Given all this, it was obvious that after 11 Aquarium albums, going to New York to record the 12th one in the same vein would have been strange. A chance meeting with Dave Stewart in Los Angeles determined the musical direction of my “American album,” because Eurythmics, for various reasons, occupied an extraordinary place in my world at the time. The spark caught, the work began. The entire following year became one grand adventure—not “the adventures of a Russian abroad,” but something much more. All the songs (except Radio Silence itself) were written in direct response to the circumstances around me.

The whole process was filmed by director Michael Apted, and released as Long Way Home. Boring—because all the interesting bits were mercilessly cut out by dull American censors. In between sessions I flew back to Russia, where Aquarium carefully listened to everything that had been recorded.

The vocals on Radio Silence are, admittedly, rather weak—out of sheer inexperience. But the songs came through, and I’m glad the album remains an undeciphered hieroglyph. It achieved its purpose. The gods were watching closely, and they responded. One more song was recorded for it, Drama, but, as far as I remember, the tape was never even mixed.

P.S. London, Church Studios. Late at night. We’d spent the day recording with Ray, Annie, and Chrissie. In the evening Billy MacKenzie of The Associates—who was making his solo album downstairs—came up to see how we were doing. We played him the draft of That Voice Again. Five minutes later he was singing it. Everyone in the studio fell silent (this was the full eleven-minute version, not the trimmed CBS edit). Two takes. He walked into the control room and asked: “Will that do?” For several minutes no one could answer a word. We all just sat there, spellbound, afraid to move.

Critics? My condolences, gentlemen critics.

Radio London

A London interlude, 1990. Almost everything was recorded at the home studio of Chucho Merchán, the bassist of Eurythmics, as demos for a follow-up to Radio Silence. I played guitars and sang; he programmed the computer and played bass. Each song took no more than two days. Gakkel flew in to London specifically to help with the music. You don’t hear him on the recordings, but every night during playback there were feathers flying. On our days off we wandered around London, listened to antique music, or chewed the bark of Amazonian oak—and so on.

Fortunately, Sony and I disagreed over the choice of producer (Ray Cooper’s name meant nothing to them, but he was the one I wanted to work with). So the demos never became a finished record; Sony and I parted ways amicably, like ships at sea. One of the songs written during that wonderful time was Elizabeth. And just barely visible on the horizon—though not yet to the human eye—was The Russian Album.

Assa and Other Film Music

Our relationship with cinema—mostly through our beloved Sergei Aleksandrovich Solovyov—went like this. He would say: “I’m making a new film.” We would ask: “What do you need for it?” And he’d reply: “Here’s a studio at Mosfilm [the main Soviet film studio]. Write something, and we’ll see what works.”

So we wrote. Some material we kept for ourselves, some went into the films, and the rest ended up on the album Roses.

It all began with the music for Assa. A record was even released—but in my opinion, the real music for Assa wasn’t on it. I mean those monstrous string improvisations that so perfectly underscored the bleak life and death of Emperor Paul I. Still, we always appreciated the electric version of The Plane that came from that session.

By the time of Roses, we already knew how Mosfilm operated, which meant we could get away with much more (for example, a “Treatise on a Teapot” that gently flowed into The Ship of Fools). That’s why, in my view, Roses can almost be considered a numbered Aquarium album. One track alone—The Commissar—defines an entire period of our lives, at least philosophically. It’s practically Radio Silence.

It was during the Roses sessions that the idea of the Russian-Abyssinian Orchestra first appeared—still embryonic and playful, but already powerful enough to take over half the album. The mystery of Loya Bykanakh remains unsolved—where did it come from? But it came, and it was right. The same principle would later guide the real Russian-Abyssinian Orchestra. (The second vocal on Loya is Andrei Gorokhov from Ado.)

The music for Dom [The House] was much less spontaneous, though it was precisely that project that inspired the creation of the Anna Karenina Quartet. Around the same time we also recorded Polar Explorers and Don’t Stand in the Way.

So overall, cinema’s influence on Aquarium can only be considered entirely positive.

The History of Aquarium. Archive Vol. 3

At a festival in Montreal, our longtime friends Crosby, Stills & Nash, inspired by the Russian spirit, ceremoniously presented Aquarium with a mobile eight-track studio. We set it up in the Palace of Communications in Leningrad, where it became the base for countless experiments and sleepless nights. Time moved centrifugally, with magic and personal problems hanging so thick in the air you could cut them with a knife—a true “transitional period.” But the brothers’ gift didn’t rust away in vain.

Aquarium was mutating. Our old friend Oleg Sakmarov—musicologist by training, psychonaut and rock star by nature (the future Grandfather Vasily, Terminator 4, the Kazan Beast, and the Terror of the Multiverse)—became an official member, and for a while we played with two flutes. After the American tour with the Radio Silence Band, Tit went off on his own, and bass duties briefly returned to Feinstein before being handed to Sergei Berezov. Our longtime sound engineer, explorer of acoustic spaces, and forest man Slava Egorov emigrated to Canada, replaced by Oleg Goncharov, a “future Indian.”

Everything was changing daily. At such speeds, our attempts to record a proper album were doomed—but still, a few songs cut through the chaos. (These recordings circulated among fans as the “unreleased album” Feudalism.)

Stas Namin, a longtime Aquarium admirer, launched SNC Records and offered to release our first CD. As in 1980, something was clearly ending, and something else was beginning—the parallel with Acoustics was obvious. We collected studio experiments, unreleased but beloved live recordings, and added a few tracks recorded especially for the release. History of A gained its third volume, we gained our first CD, and the 1980s were left behind.

The Russian Album

Not to be confused with Aquarium—this was “BG,” or the “BG Band” (same people, different mission). There are over a hundred playful interpretations of the abbreviation BG; the mildest is “Chaos Guaranteed”. When Aquarium-80 ceremoniously dissolved itself in April 1991, new songs poured out as if a dam had burst. Perhaps the very weight of the Aquarium name had been stifling us, holding back any new creative impulse. Now we needed a smaller, acoustic, and very mobile lineup.

It all began with Her Majesty and Nikita. Ryusha, Shchurakov, Ded, and I gathered at the Palace of Communications in Leningrad and, for the first time in years, rehearsed. Then Ded said: “Why don’t we go play a concert in Kazan?” That simple phrase set off a year and a half of touring and a fundamental shift in our music.

The repertoire had to be invented on the fly—often right before concerts. The important thing was to leave as much space as possible between this project and Aquarium. Coming up with a brand-new name would have been silly, but posters had to say something, so we chose the simplest option. During those spring, summer, and autumn tours, The Russian Albumwrote itself. The original acoustic quartet soon, out of habit, grew to include Berezov, and by the end of the year Pyotr had joined as well. The urge to play was so strong we hardly remember going home at all. Thanks to all the towns and roads that inspired these songs. A typically Russian view: the church seen through the bottom of a vodka bottle. Chaos guaranteed.

Recording of The Russian Album began in early 1992 at the Moscow House of Radio (at their kind invitation). Once again we found ourselves in a “state” studio, but Moscow—unlike official Petersburg—had long since learned how to coexist with officialdom, treating it like bad weather. We encountered “the state” at the entrance and exit; inside was our own empire. Even with security in Moscow, you could always come to a human arrangement.

The first people we ran into in the corridors of the House of Radio were our old acquaintances from the Kuryokhin days: Slava Gaivoronsky and Volodya Volkov—trumpet and double bass, respectively. With them, Sirin, Alkonost, Gamayunfound its completion. Later, back in Petersburg on the Fontanka, Gaivoronsky would play on our version of I Want to Be With You and appear again on Ramses. Volkov—or rather one of his bass lines—had once inspired our ancient magnum opus We Will Never Grow Old.

On the train from Petersburg to Moscow, on our way to record, we “accidentally” ran into Alexei Pavlovich Zubarev, a longtime and respected friend from the band Season of Rain (and, according to unverified rumors, a distant descendant of hobbits). Over a bottle of cognac he told us he had left Season and was now free. He always carried his guitar; the very next day he walked into the House of Radio and added it to The Horses. His involvement decided itself.

Letters of Captain Voronin

A concert recording can never capture all the nuances of the band. Russian Symphony, for example, was performed in Vyatka so completely for the first time that no one could predict what chord would come next—yet the telepathic connection was clearly there. During The Critic, our sound engineer crawled onto the stage and performed folk “Indian dances” (something like Swan Lake in reverse).

Ryusha wasn’t in Vyatka; perhaps he had grown tired of diving headfirst, in full uniform, into bathtubs filled with roses, and so he left for Germany to rest and play early music in the “authentic” style. His old acquaintance S. Ryzhenko was urgently summoned to replace him, but upon arrival in Vyatka he couldn’t overcome severe psychological stress. So the concert was played as a quartet.

Across Russia, these wandering minstrels roamed merrily. Mornings in new towns usually began with a visit to the local church—I can probably still recall in which city which icons were hanging in which corner. By June 1991 we were playing on the Solovetsky Islands (bringing with us from Nizhny Novgorod a splendid icon of The Appearance of the Mother of God to Andrei Bogolyubsky). The concert was brightly lit by sparking and burning electrical wires along the opposite wall; in the former refectory (described in detail, they say, in Solzhenitsyn’s chronicles) it hadn’t been warm for decades, until the walls thawed and the wires began to short out. The monks snuck into the concert in secret.

(For balance, it should be noted that on the way to Solovki, the captain of the icebreaker that carried us allegedly drank with us all the alcohol from the ship’s compass fluid—or so eyewitnesses claim.)

Evenings after the concerts were spent over otherworldly amounts of vodka, debating the history of Russian theology, the theory and practice of icon painting, and related subjects. It’s said not all witnesses survived intact.

This went on for almost a year and a half. But by the summer of 1992, it became clear that something new was approaching. We heard a strange prophecy, and together with Ded and Alexei Pavlovich we set out on a concert pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

The Library of Babylon

In truth, this was the first project Aquarium of the “second convocation” began working on. Tit and Ratzen had their own studio on the Fontanka, and when we became one band it was natural to try to use it to the fullest. We started by gathering everything that hadn’t been fully captured on Archive, which led to recording many songs that had never been put on tape before—serving also as a test of the band as a working unit. A good example is The Jungle, a song we had tried to record back with the old Aquarium during The House Under the Starry Sky. On The Library it was carefully reworked in light of new revelations. Even Tit’s dog Chuy makes an appearance—barking faintly at the end of the track, and of course barking backwards in time. Nothing was too sacred to be touched.

The Sands of Petersburg

An experiment in projecting this lineup backward into time—what if everything we had now had also existed back then? The songs were originally written between 1975 and 1986, gathered in my head (and partly finished) while I was in Jerusalem reading a 1907 travel guide to the Volga, and recorded by Aquarium in 1993. The album might never have happened; it wasn’t clear if it was worth resurrecting songs that had long disappeared from our lives. Some entities I consulted during mixing made snide remarks about whether I was right to release everything I wrote (“the graphomaniac syndrome,” one spirit said sardonically).

Yet the overall impression of these recordings turned out to be unexpectedly positive and uplifting. It’s a pity the passage from The Book of the Dead, read through a megaphone at the end of Uncle Thompson, is so hard to make out. The only new song here was St. George’s Day—new in the sense that to two opening lines from 1977 I attached a different song. The ways of the Lord are truly inscrutable; the result was one of my most beloved songs.

The Songs of Vertinsky

There can be no justification for this crime against public taste. That many friends had urged me to do it, and that these songs had been spicing up our concerts since 1983, was no reason to drag them into the studio. Or, if we were going to, then we should have spent ten times longer on them. These songs had always (since I was 10) been respected by me, often sung at night, and they deserve much more than they got.

Kostroma Mon Amour

It was a period when I wanted to write stadium rock ’n’ roll, but only park waltzes came out. All the songs were written on the road. Around that time we connected with the Mongolian folk ensemble Temudzhin—unfortunately we never managed to record with them, but an authentic Mongolian fragment still made its way into Moscow October. Sing, Sing, Lyra was an old forgotten text by George that suddenly leapt out of a notebook and was heavily reworked.

For formality’s sake we recorded again at Melodiya [the Soviet state record label], and although the engineers were good, the feeling of stiffness was unavoidable. (In the end, we used the version of Lyra recorded at the Fontanka studio instead.) To pull the album out of its total-waltz state, we added I Need You and Suvlekhim—songs first written back in summer ’88 at Valdai, together with Voronin, Skobelev, When the Pain Passes, and Royal Morning. It was a natural move, since both songs were already staples at concerts of the time, letting us go full overdrive and say things directly.

The walls on Pushkinskaya Street were repainted a dark Tibetan red; I went to Nepal and came back—after visiting all the lamas and all the stupas—with the finished album cover and a strong desire to re-record all the vocals (which turned out to be quite reasonable—after a week wandering through caves and monasteries, one really does sing better. Since then, that’s how we’ve done it). It was there, too, that Gertrude was finally completed, after drifting around Russia for a long time but finding its final form on the main street of Kathmandu.

The album turned out uncontrived—and therefore much loved. Exactly as Aquarium should be. “Little precise sounds”—that was one of the early definitions of Aquarium, back in 1973.

Navigator

It all began on a train to Odessa. I woke up around three in the morning, tormented by thirst and by a line circling in my head that wouldn’t let me sleep: “The Badaev warehouses roar and burn…” What warehouses? Why roar and burn? No answer. (Eventually this became Katya-Katerina—and didn’t even make it onto the album.) But the spark was lit. Songs that write themselves, almost without the author’s conscious thought.

It continued the same way in our village: The Turn, The Ficus, and others—one song a day. After the village came Paris: a big concert at the Théâtre de la Ville, just a week after Bulat Okudzhava had played there. For that show, the small local label Buda Records released our first Western “big hits” compilation (Boris Grebenshikov & Aquarium, 1991–1994). The flood of songs didn’t stop. Each morning I sat in a café on the boulevards, drinking coffee and writing down whatever came. Out came Sisters, Navigator, Garçon, Maxim the Woodsman, and Mayetsa. All in one week. Believe me—this doesn’t happen.

The wave continued in Kathmandu, where The Cemetery and Nastassia’s Song were born. That whole winter we recorded demos on Pushkinskaya Street (The Airplane and The Customs Blues were added there). It became clear the album needed the sound of a violin, so Ryusha brought in his colleague in early music, Andrei Surotdinov, who immediately and flawlessly joined our ragged ranks.

In the spring, Aleksei Pavlovich, Sergei Shchurakov, and I played a concert in London. There, unexpectedly, I ran into my old acquaintance Joe Boyd—the very same Joe Boyd of The Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, and half the history of rock ’n’ roll. He offered a few compliments and said he’d like to help with the recordings if he could.

A month later I was checking out Livingston Studios and meeting Kate St. John. She played oboe brilliantly, knew an incredible number of musicians, and loved our songs almost as much as I did. For two months we faxed each other several times a day, fine-tuning arrangements and comparing the madness of our methods. Then summer came, and the real recording began.

It was simple: take the Tube to the center, ride the Piccadilly Line out to Wood Green, then walk three minutes to the studio. A quiet London morning. Jerry Boys—the owner and chief engineer, who had started back with the Beatles—spun the tape with a joke. Young Simon brought fresh coffee. “What shall we start with today?”

“Less more flute, please!” shouted Ded from the mic (a phrase that became a standing joke at Livingston Studios). Bands recording next door tried to lure Shchurakov away to decorate their tracks with his improbably beautiful accordion. “I’ll come tomorrow,” said Mick Taylor. Jerry, who had known him for years, smiled: “He’ll probably show up by the end of the week.” Sure enough, Mick arrived Thursday evening, asked me to translate the lyrics, then cranked his guitar to ten and played everything in twenty minutes.

At that moment, it felt as if we had slipped into orbit. The world, finally, had become one place—not divided into nations and political districts.

In the end, a Russian only becomes truly Russian once he stops being dependent on his local precinct.

Snow Lion

The burst of songwriting that gave us Navigator didn’t stop there. The same village handed me The Fighter, while walks in the unearthly heat and silence of the Valley of the Kings crystallized into Ancient Russian Longing. At first it seemed the natural thing was to make a mischievous lo-fi sequel to Navigator, and of course call it Alligator. But the demos showed it was something far more serious, and it was time to head back to Livingston Studios.

Around that time, on a Petersburg–Moscow flight, a bearded young poet approached me and gave me a book of his poems. Normally I have a violent allergy to almost any poetry—but this book opened itself, and I stumbled on two lines. Within a week I realized I couldn’t escape them. I called the number written in the book and confessed that his words had struck home and were already turning into a song. A ridiculous situation. But he seemed to understand, and he gave his blessing. The poet’s name was Andrei Chernov. The lines were:

The train driver himself doesn’t know
That he’s carrying you to me.

And so, back we went to London. The Mellotron (the very one that plays at the start of Railway Symphony) was still waiting for us from the Navigator sessions.

Listening carefully, Jerry [Boys, engineer at Livingston] said: “I think I know how this ought to sound.” He tracked down some old sound-processing equipment, gathering dust since the end of ’68. A family of Indians arrived with sitars and tampuras; a woman came with a Celtic harp, giggling with a witchy laugh; and an older, calm, bearded man arrived with Uilleann pipes (ancient Irish bagpipes). He listened to the tracks and asked, “Do you need me to play something specially written, or just what I hear here?” I said: “The music of the gods.” “I know,” he replied, played, and left.

The express train in Longing was simulated by Bob Loveday of Aquarium’s beloved Penguin Café Orchestra. The middle-eight of Silver Rose was written by Kate [St. John] (with one or two mantras added on my part), and the center of Brahman by Sergei Sh. (Incidentally, the full title of Rose is The Silver Rose Strips the World.) Bit by bit, what had started as Alligator turned into something else—though it still had no name.

And then, on the road from Vyatka to Moscow, I woke in the middle of the night with Snow Lion: at once the name, the cover, and the track order. It had arrived—and everything fell into place.

Chubchik

It all began back in the same Palace of Communications studio, in early 1992. After recording music for Tikhomirov’s film Grass and Water, we couldn’t refuse when asked to write music for the animated film Mitki-Mayer. The songs we recorded for it were forgotten for a long time, and when the tapes resurfaced years later, they caused quite a stir (meaning: quite a lot of vodka was consumed to them).

The second batch was The Raven and Darling, recorded at the Fontanka studio during the Sands and Vertinsky sessions. The third part came in the winter of 1995–96, at the Pushkinskaya studio, where we recorded all the demos for Navigatorand Snow Lion. The temperature hovered around zero, there was no gas or heat, and the electricity flickered on and off by the minute. Heroic conditions, to put it plainly. But also—great joy.

And so my chronicle ends. Almost all of its characters took part in shaping it. Let me say again: this is not a “history of Aquarium,” but simply scattered stories of our recordings, with occasional glimpses of the bigger picture—without which this chronicle would make no sense. The full story was known only to us, but as the saying goes: “Anyone who claims to remember what really happened in Aquarium was never actually in Aquarium.”

And the songs don’t belong to us, but to those who listen. They are yours, not ours. We were just lucky enough to be part of their recording.

---

Section: Memoirs and Recollections
Date: 1997
Author: Boris Grebenshchikov

Also, in book

BG. Songs
Published by Lean, 1997.
528 pages, hardcover with dust jacket. Print run: 7,000 copies. (Second edition, revised and expanded by the author).