Another influential Moscow band was Tsentr (Center), shaped in 1980 by singer-songwriter and bass player Vasily Shumov. Tsentr became known for its cool, monotonous, new wave vogue, Shumov’s detached manner and good, sardonic lyrics, likewise as its elaborate musical arrangements. Since 1989, Shumov has lived in California, where he has worked in electronic music. He has continued to be a very important presence on the Russian scene.
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| Tsentr |
Another cult band, created in 1985, was Vezhlivyi Otkaz (Polite Refusal), notable for its ‘quirkiness.’ Its vogue was permeated with a significant irony, and therefore the band blended in its music parts of jazz, Russian classical romances, cabaret, progressive rock and even parts galvanized by Russian futurists. Vezhlivyi Otkaz greatly benefited from the made vocals of Inna Zhelannaia, who within the Nineties began her own good career as Russia’s pre-eminent world music diva. proficient showman Gor (Gor Oganesian) created for the band its famously ‘absurdist’ stage show.
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| Vezhlivyi Otkaz |
Nikolai Kopernik (Nikolai Copernicus), an awfully influential avant-garde band, was additionally established in 1985. Its founder, Yuri Orlov, formerly a member of the progressive instrumental rock band Dzhungli (Jungle), live a shaman life in Khakassia, an autonomous region on the border with Mongolia, where he brought interest within the musical heritage of the aboriginal peoples of Siberia. As a result, his band, by 1986, created a most exotic and eclectic however, at a similar time, artistically powerful mixture of new wave music, shamanistic singing, evocative intonations from Russian folklore, arrangements with a psychedelic feel, a way of a meditative estrangement from reality and a highly polished sound. Till now, Russia had very little familiarity with world musics.
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| Nikolai Kopernik |
Nochnoi Prospekt (Night Avenue), that 1st performed in 1985, was created by well-known Russian composer, arranger and keyboard player Ivan Sokolovsky. He left the band in 1989 to start an illustrious solo career. Nochnoi Prospekt was one in all the strongest Moscow promoters of latest wave, and was known for its tongue-in-cheek satirical lyrics. Sokolovsky typically performed as a duet with guitarist Alexei Borisov, with a background provided by a pre-recorded tape.
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| Nochnoi Prospekt |
In 1986, an awfully fashionable band, Va-bank, was shaped by a former Soviet junior diplomat to North Korea, Aleksand Skliar, and started to perform its intense and uncompromising mixture of R&B and punk.
In the Eighties, Moscow additionally made an array of illustrious heavy metal bands like Ariia (Aria), Chernyi Kofe (Black Coffee), Korroziia Metalla (Corrosion of Metal) and Trizna (Funeral Feast).
Other Moscow bands of importance throughout the Eighties were Bravo, fronted by the ‘scandalous lady’ Zhanna Aguzarova; Brigada-S (Brigade-S), fronted by the thuggish trying, witty and proficient Garrik Sukachev; Krematorii (Crematorium), a sluggish hippie band with an ambition to produce a cult answer Leningrad’s famous Akvarium; the couple Proshchai Molodost (Goodbye Youth), fascinating in its mixture of rock and classical Russian romances; Biokostructor, an electronic music duo; and Niuans (Nuance), who played a mix of ‘white’ reggae and funk, from time to time sliding into avant-garde experimentation.
Two singer-songwriters with equally tragic fates, an analogous cult standing, and having a very important influence on the shaping of the Russian rock tradition came to Leningrad and Moscow from the provinces, ending there their lives in suicide, then to be catapulted to the head of the Russian rock pantheon. Alexander Bashlachev, thought-about to be the foremost proficient rock poet of Russia, was additionally a robust tunesmith and a awfully powerful, even ecstatic performer of his own songs. He played alone, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar. He arrived in Leningrad from the provincial town of Cherepovets and was, from 1984 till 1988, a ‘crown prince’ of Russian bard rock and therefore the poetry-oriented movement of the Russian rock scene. In 1989, he committed suicide by throwing himself out of a tenth-story window.
Yanka Diagileva, wife of Yegor Letov and a pacesetter of the ‘scandalous’ Siberian cult band Grazhdanskaia Oborona, was a ‘princess’ of bard rock. Her act was principally acoustic. However, she was sometimes in the course of a drum. Having grown up in Siberia, she was terribly acquainted with the harshness of the Soviet reality. Her songs, though typically powerful, were markedly dark and painful. Whereas in Moscow she drowned her self (in 1991) and joined Bashlachev at the head of Soviet rock.
(... to be continued)
