FROM THE HISTORY OF THE BAND 'OBLACHNY KRAY'. CHAPTER 15: UNCLE MISHA IS ALIVE!

At the time, I was working as a staff sound engineer at ANtROP, and along with the other guys, I handled the bands that came in off the street. Tropillo would audition them sometimes and decide whether to record them or not. If the guys paid money, the question didn't even arise: they paid, so we're at your service. I'd get some money, send it home, and barely have enough left to live on. But then there was another problem: you'd sit with a band like that for eight to ten hours, and after they left, your own shift would begin, and you were incapable of doing anything else except brewing yourself some strong tea and vegging out in front of the evening TV broadcasts. No matter how well they played, your human resources are easily depleted when you have to closely monitor someone else's creative process. Meanwhile, the studio costs eight hundred rubles an hour, and for that money, I had to be as useful as possible; otherwise, next time they'd choose a different sound engineer. And you couldn't exactly tell them, like, 'Pack up your gear faster and fuck off back home, go to hell, you fucking assholes, you're in the way of my work...' You really want to say it to them, the words are practically itching to come out, but instead, you give them helpful advice and watch their playing closely so you don't miss any screw-ups. So you sweat it out, gritting your teeth, recording them, and recording them, and those bastards keep messing up again, and again, and you just keep recording them. And then there are requests like, 'We'd really like it to sound like the latest Yes album.'Motherfucker, you need to at least learn how to play first, just move your little fingers around—what the fuck do you need Yes for, you filthy goat? You get a 'No', not a 'Yes'! But for some reason, musicians think they are completely at the mercy of the guy behind the console, and they don't understand that if every note is played on time and cleanly, you don't even need a sound operator. Or they'll bring in the latest Judas Priest album and say it absolutely has to sound like them, because they're paying money and have a right to sound like Judas Priest. In those cases, I always look up the release info on the album and tell them, 'Guys, you've got the wrong outlet. You need this specific city, on this specific street there's a studio where Judas Priest records. Deep in the basement of that building, deep underground, there's an acoustic chamber with twenty kilowatts of power. At a short distance from the speaker systems are twelve microphones of various designs—condenser, ribbon, and dynamic. When a musician makes a sound, the sound pressure created in that underground chamber exceeds the fatal pain threshold many times over, should a living human ever find themselves in there. But this isn't the outskirts of London; the Hermitage and the Moyka are right next door here.