Ygyatta

With the album "Ygyatta", we are beginning to publish a retrospective of the albums by the legendary Oblachnyy Kray for your consideration. The band is the brainchild of the virtuoso guitarist, multi-instrumentalist, poet, and writer of the vast majority of the band's compositions, Sergey Bogaev. All albums have been restored and remastered. Bonus tracks from the same period these albums were recorded have been added.

This work was the last in Sergey's life; shortly after its completion, he tragically died. Besides being incredibly strong in terms of its creative composition and engineering work, this album is also notable for being the very last recording made at the famous studio of the legendary Andrey Tropillo, "AnTrop", which ceased to exist after this album was recorded.

The track "Mechtatel" ("The Dreamer"), a melodeclamation that stands out sharply among the other numbers on the album, was, according to Boris Kononov, the result of joint studio work by Sergey Bogaev (vocals, guitars), Vladimir Nosyrev (keyboards), Alexey Vishnya (keyboards, special effects) and Evgeny Guberman (drums); Bogaev was the sound engineer, and the album was recorded at Andrey Tropillo's AnTrop studio on Tsvetochnaya street in St Petersburg. Kononov made a video sketch for "Mechtatel" during Bogaev's lifetime, and the clip came out on 22 December 2011, Bogaev's fiftieth birthday, together with the clip for "Aria of the Varangian Guests"; at the evening in the rock café on Chkalovskaya street they were shown without sound.

According to a Pravda Severa feature (2022), Bogaev took the title "Ygyatta" from a large map brought home by his father, a sailor: it is the name of a Yakut river that caught his eye there.

In a video interview about the album Bogaev said that he had loved geography since childhood and studied two large maps, of the world and of the Soviet Union: moving east from Arkhangelsk along the map he came to the Lena, then to its tributary the Vilyuy and to a tributary of the Vilyuy, the Ygyatta, and the word stuck with him. He had wanted to give an album that title as early as 1982 (the map then hung on his wall), but the name was not used until the recording of this album. According to him, the river can no longer be found on the modern maps he bought later.

Credits

• Guest musicians:
• Egor Antonyuk: balalaika
• Vladimir Nosyrev: keyboards
• Natalya Tarasenko: flute
• Maksim Zhupikov: violin
• Mikhail Kostyushkin: saxophone (11, 13)
• Mikhail Kvokov: saxophone (3, 10)
• Andrey Tabakov: backing vocals
• Aleksandr Oshlakov: backing vocals (9)
• Pavel Krishevskikh: piano (6)
• Recorded at AnTrop Studio from 2006 to 2010, Saint Petersburg
• Sound engineer: Sergey Bogaev
• Mixing: Sergey Bogaev
• Computer design: Aleksey Bulygin. Arkhangelsk
• Photos: Igor Borodin. Arkhangelsk
• Preparation for print: Anna Sokolova
• Remastering of the album and bonus tracks: Igor Plenov 2015, Saint Petersburg

Editions

• CD in a 3-panel digipak, Bomba-Piter (CDMAN 460-11), 2011