2: 1968--1980
Entered the Seventies, Russian rock split in 2. They have to learnt to sing in their own language, at the same time their musicians have to faced the very tightly controll of the VIA teams. This decade shown as the most uninteresting music ever created by Soviet rock musicians. The reasons are that 1st of all, t it increasingly harder for amateur bands to play and to perform. Punishment can be quite significant. Student rock musicians expelled from their universities for such offensesfor example. In some extreme cases, rock musicians were punished just for haul their equipment. Several musicians stay and hide in their basements and garages. Some acoustic ‘private concert’ for a ‘chosen few’ friends flourished.
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| Mashina Vremeni |
An important role during this relative musical stagnation was additionally played by the sort of Western music that was listened to which was very talked-about among the elite cadre of Soviet rock devotees who were shaping the national rock scene. By way the foremost influential sorts of Western at now were British and European art rock, techno rock and progressive rock. Bands like Pink Floyd, Genesis, light large, Procol Harum, King Crimson, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Yes, Focus and Exception, likewise as performers like Rick Wakeman, Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Roxy Music were extraordinarily fashionable. to form such music at intervals the confines of an apartment was not possible, though Soviet rock musicians tried to play deep, overblown, philosophical art rock. the overall direction that Soviet rock took at now is characterized as following the traditions and trying to approximate the stylistic options and techniques of Western progressive rock bands. This constituted a global rock trend that remained terribly influential within the Soviet Union throughout the Nineteen Seventies.
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| Golubye Gitary |
Several 1st generation bands from the Nineteen Sixties, like Mify (Myths) from Leningrad, Skomorokhi (Jesters) and Alexander Gradsky and Mashina Vremeni (The Time Machine) from Moscow, continued to play through the Nineteen Seventies. whereas others, like Leningrad’s pre-eminent band Sankt Petersburg (St Petersburg), disbanded early within the decade.
Classically trained vocalist and composer Alexander Gradsky remained a musical guru and a moving force in Russian rock throughout this era. He was one in all a awfully few musicians who managed to bridge the gap between his own artistry and therefore the realm officialdom, retaining his iconoclastic underground standing, however at a similar time manufacturing work that appeared on records issued by the govt record label Melodiya, and being sometimes played on the radio, likewise as writing music for a preferred Soviet film.
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| Araks |
Several different necessary bands of the Nineteen Seventies additionally traversed the gap between official and unofficial music. Nineteen Fifties jazz saxophone player Alexey Kozlov established his acclaimed jazz-rock fusion band Arsenal in 1972. To avoid the tight ideological management musicians were subject to in Moscow, the band accepted skilled standing within the provincial town of Kaliningrad, from where it traveled round the country comparatively unharassed.
Moscow’s Mashina Vremeni (The Time Machine), a melancholy bard rock (singer-songwriter) band created in 1969 gained a cult following starting within the mid-1970s, largely thanks to the lyrics of its proficient leader, Andrei Makarevich. Mashina Vremeni experimented with a spread of music designs, starting with Beatles-like songs, moving to exhausting rock and ‘white’ blues within the mid-1970s, and then to jazz-rock fusion at the top of the last decade. Never turning into an officer Soviet VIA, Mashina Vremeni nevertheless was allowed to perform to massive audiences, had recordings created on the Melodiya label and recorded music for many movies.
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| Akvarium (live in 2004) |
Another legendary band, Araks, found for itself an initial niche taking part in music for the Moscow Theater of Lenin’s Youth, and later recorded music for films. The band gave near three hundred concerts per year within the late Nineteen Seventies.
One of the foremost important events on the underground scene throughout the Nineteen Seventies was the creation in 1972 by Leningrad singer-songwriter, guitarist and composer Boris Grebenshchikov of his enormously fashionable perennially cult band Akvarium (Aquarium). Throughout the Nineteen Seventies, Akvarium went through a awfully intensive amount of self discovery and experimentation, flirting with jazz, art and exhausting rock, reggae, Baroque music and Celtic and Russian folks music, and dealing entirely with either acoustic or purely electrical sound. All this primary work paid off within the Eighties when Akvarium emerged as a pacesetter of Soviet rock.
(...to be continued)
