Хориные Бега

So anyway, Shurka and I had already been mates for a while (at some point this young, curious kid turned up and started spending more and more time with us in the kitchen over grog and acoustic guitars), and then he listened to Egor Letov, came round and said his name was now Nekrofil ("Necrophile"). So, right.

Some time after that I started working out in the forest, on a fire lookout tower. Azimuth, binoculars, phone, a duty schedule. I won't say the work was complicated, but you had to sit out your hours strictly, and for every suspicious puff of smoke you had to call in and seriously explain the coordinates to the switchboard ladies. The kind of thing that happened: once some guy at the neighboring tower cheerfully knocked back two shifts' worth of vodka with his buddies and supposedly didn't notice the smoke right away. And underneath, peat had been quietly burning underground, and when the fire brigade finally showed up on the scene, it went straight down into the hollowed-out ground. So the job called for a love of nature and a certain attentiveness. Yeah, like Petka said, the tower swayed. And that was wonderful. The pines swayed the same way all around. But the cemetery off to the right didn't sway. It just quietly kept growing instead. Once I tried planting some seeds at its edge - they died. They came up first, then died. That's the energy for you! But it howled out its own songs too.

On the whole, though, the smoke wasn't that frequent, and I'd bring my acoustic along. So it worked out that I'd play it something like eight hours a day. And my moods back then weren't exactly clear-cut. All sorts of feelings, misunderstandings, cravings. And it didn't quite come out in plain, simple words. Mostly images instead. And besides, by that point it was really time to narrow my mind down a bit, since I'd "over-widened" it. And Shurka never minded the walk out there, and he loved playing - terrifyingly so. So the two of us started putting together "Хориные бега" ("Ferret Races") out there in the forest. When I say "he loved playing - terrifyingly so", I mean it without exaggeration: he'd come up with two parts at once - bass and lead guitar. And really, we had to get a move on, because he was getting ready to head off to America, to work as some kind of camp counselor… And that's how a "mini" album came about, and that's a good thing.

Vantuz, a friend of ours from those days, was over in England at the time, so the choice of recording studio was obvious - Kuzya's place. And the beauty of it was that he lived (and lives, and will live!) right above Shurka. So it was always clear whether Kuzya was home or not, going by whether loud music was playing in the stairwell. I always privately wondered how he'd trained the neighbors into that. Must take years, I guess.

We recorded it all in one go. Gennady ran the drum machine and did the mixing. On the song "Га-га-га" ("Ga-ga-ga") he sat down at the accordion and played along. Just great, having a sound engineer who's also a multi-instrumentalist on hand. The intro featured my landlord, a man named Edik, whose grumbling could only be cured with either spirit, or by turning on the tape recorder and telling him "quiet, we're recording, go on, sing." And did he love singing, every bit as much as Nekrofil loved playing! Only, as the intro makes clear, he didn't remember everything anymore. And he fairly called moments like that a "провал" ("blackout"/"gap"). That very beauty of the moment is what gave the album its name.

Once we'd finished recording, we grabbed the master cassette, a couple of copies, and went hopping off to the Kabanovs' for a birthday party. Just like a couple of ferrets.