Oblachny Kray - Mother of Order [video from DVD box set Podolsk 87]

I liked the multichannel recording so much, I understood - all our experiments with consumer tape recorders have irrevocably gone into the past and we have new landmarks ahead. My admiration for Andrey Tropillo grew - after all, the man, risking his job, managed to create such a thing with his own hands in such partisan, underground conditions... Against the background of all this euphoria, I was overcome by terrible annoyance that my friends - Kolya and Oleg - couldn't see all this.

While I was recording guitars during the first week, Tropillo was looking for a drummer, which turned out to be not a simple task, because music of this kind was played quite rarely. Finally, when the guitars and bass were already recorded, a drummer from the band "Tambourine" Sasha Petelin appeared - we knew nothing about each other, but he responded to Andrey's offer to play in the studio.

Having listened to the material, he perked up - "Pssh, what's there to play, it's a piece of cake, I thought it would be something really complicated...", but here, I must say, he got a little ahead of himself, because after a few test takes it turned out that he had never played such music before and that it was more difficult than what he played in the "Tambourine" band: he played a few songs, of which only one made it into the album - "Suck - suck a little" - he really played great there, we kept it. But in the evening, while listening to the recorded material, we still decided that Petelin wasn't very suitable for our project and we needed to find someone else - more rigid, technical, aggressive and energetic.

Tropillo remembered that he had a drummer who could handle such a task - especially since I already knew him - Zhenya Guberman, he had come with Aquarium to Arkhangelsk, which I already wrote about. When Zhenya sat down and started playing right off the bat, I was just blown away. I hadn't had to interact with musicians of this level before, besides, I really love drums myself, it's one of my favorite musical instruments. And when I heard how such a sound of a drum kit with such technique, with such invention is superimposed on my guitar music - I was simply swollen with delight, from surprise and from all the feelings that rushed over me! In addition, Zhenya turned out to be such a simple, pleasant person to communicate with, which was very surprising - it was flattering that a real professional musician, unlike us, backyard amateurs, and such a musician agreed to play with us. I was also surprised that Zhenya never drank anything at all, it's scary to say - neither wine, nor vodka, and even ignored beer, which for me was generally something from the realm of transcendental heights. Nevertheless, it was so.

(to be concluded)

Recorded from the words of the author by Alexey Vishnya.
Source: Sergey Bogaev's memoirs specially for Special Radio.

March 2005