Tag: St Petersburg

ROARING TRADE: PILOT LIVE AT GLAV CLUB, MOSCOW NOVEMBER 9TH.

Is this much-loved band the saviour of the Russian rock genre?

This November Saturday night proved to be as grey as the preceding October and I hoped that this band, new to me, could buoy me up – in particular as those last two live gigs had left me unmoved.
They did.

Pilot [short /i/and beat on the second syllable] were recommended to me during a rare chance encounter with a self-confessed Russian rock fan who was also a Russian himself. This seemed a good enough omen in itself.

The Pied Piper’s of St Pete’s.
The second good omen came when I tried to get my ticket. For various reasons I buy my tickets in person over the counter. My trusty usual kiosk told me that all the tickets had already been pocketed. I got lucky at another place however.
Then at the Glav Green Club itself I encountered a queue on my way in and, along this, wideboys were pushing last-minute offers for anyone who had turned up on the off-chance.

The gig going community – and this night it did feel like a community – became so populous that we had to wait our turns to get in and out of the venue.

In the lobby meanwhile, the band’s merchandise – the lemon yellow wooly hats and scarves -were getting swallowed up faster than the stall holders could unbox new batches of them.
After twenty-two years of strumming and pounding, Pilot have the capacity to really pull the crowds.

Alt rock institution.

[Yandex.uz]

Conceived and organised in the rainy second capital of St Petersburg by Ilya `Chort`Knabengof in 1997, the band, first under the moniker Military Jane, have honed their own local strain of hard indie rock. This incorporates folkish and punkish influences but within an industrial sensibility.
What’s more, their Russian nationality seems to be encoded into these sonic emanations. Throughout their existence they have been transmorgifying into a unique brand, complete with a recognisable cartoon logo, numerous fan sites, endless photo shoots and so on.
In this tour they were revisiting an album called `Fish, Mole and Pig` which was first produced 15 years back.

Anthems for the 21st Century.
The doors of the concert venue were unlocked at 7 pm and the four piece materialised about an hour and a half later. There was no warm up act.
Following a shamanic sounding introductory soundtrack, the drummer, Nikita Belozyorov, arrived shirtless. The bass guitarist, Sergei Vyrvrich, a relaxed tall man with a floppy blonde fringe, came on next. Then Ilya himself appeared – wearing shades, which he never removed. The keyboardist was invisible (supplied by digital means, I presume).

They compensated for their nondescript appearance with much use of back projections to underscore the songs themes. Not that it was easy to see that much anyway, through the vineyard of raised phones, scarfs and girlfriends sat on shoulders.


Their opener was a declaration of intent just called `Rock`. Many in the audience seemed to have anticipated this as they held up pictures of the horned fist salute with the words `Rock` written beneath.
The next number spoke of their civic pride for their home city as the backdrop showcased it all with shots of the spires and waterways of that city. There were songs about the sex industry, the Hindu religion, psychopaths (`Nye Chelovek`) and one titled `Terrorism`.

Pilot, without offering leadership, could not be called escapist and do seem willing to confront the questions of the day.
That said, some of their compositions showed unashamed sentimentality. One involved a visual tour through old family albums and another, celebrating the band’s longevity, showcased children’s drawings from yesteryear as balloons dropped down from the ceiling.

Quite singular.
Like t.A.T.u, Pilot prove a more impressive experience live than in recorded format. Belozyorov’s tom -toms, put high in the mix, are a great boon in the upbeat ambience they create. In fact, Pilot dish out quite a detailed sound with keyboard melodies and guitar digressions aplenty.

I find it difficult to twin this outfit with any that I know in the West. Pilot owe a clear debt to the grunge of the Nineties. Otherwise they might be understood as a more slick version of their compatriots Posledni Tanki V Paris.

If `Russian rock` constitutes a genre in its own right, and many contend that it does, then Pilot might be said to be one of its last remaining popular exponents.
Sure, there are bands like Louna and IC3Peak, but the former seem to belong to an international nu metal trend and the latter to an international  dark wave hip-hop tendency. Pilot are Russian-Russian.

My kind of crowd.
The feeling in the air of this enjoyable gig had a lot to do with the punters. In their thirties and forties and not dressed to impress, they exuded cheery bonhomie. For example, they offered to hold my beer for me as I tried to take pictures. I saw no fights break out.

We all downed quite a few Tuborg’s together with a lot of help from the – let me say – angelic bar staff. I got a real sense of this being an audience who were not just here to see the band, but here to say: Here we all are! Just look at us all!

`Osyen` by Pilot.

 

Main image:Flavara.com

Mad Metropolis: In exhuming `The Doomed City` by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Gollancz have rediscovered a difficult masterpiece that still has something to say about our own times.

Supernovas in the science fiction galaxy, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, a St Petersburg writing duo, were feted in their time and their novels have been treated to numerous cinema adaptations, from the somewhat weighty `Stalker` (1979) to the more popcorn friendly `Inhabited Island` (2008).

As much as some of their visions – such as the autocratic regime in `Hard to be a God` (1964) – contain metaphorical critiques of their own government, the Strugatsky brothers have not really been viewed as dissident writers as such. That may be about to change. As a part of an S.F Masterworks series, which has been re-issuing classics of the genre since 1999, Andrew Bromfield introduced the Anglophone world to `The Doomed City` last year.

 

The brothers, following many years of secret gestation, completed this novel in 1972. However it only saw print, courtesy of `Neva press` between 1988 and 1989. This delay owes to the fact that the novel comprised – as Dmitry Glukhovsky (`Metro`2033 and 2034`) says in his indispensable Foreword -`…an allusion to the Soviet Union…so transparent that there was a reason to fear not only for the Strugatskys but also for the censors who allowed the book to see print` (p-xi).

Human zoo.

I am required by law to describe this whopping 453-page dystopia as `Kafkaesque` and indeed it is. The protagonist, Andrei Voronin is a conventional young man from Fifties period Soviet Russia. Somehow he has found himself in the world of The Experiment. In this a group of humans, some volunteers and others conscripts, are put together in a nameless City with no known location or time. Their artificial sun is switched on and off and their living space `was clearly divided into two equal halves. Looking to the west there was a boundless, blue green void – not sea and not even sky…To the east…was an unbounded expanse of solid yellow…Infinite Void to the west and infinite Solidity to the east`. (Pages 266-267).

The inhabitants undergo what seem to be meaningless trials but there are wraithlike Mentors who seem to appear out of nowhere to dispense gnomic wisdom, and to remind Voronin that `The Experiment is the Experiment`.

 

The Experiment means The Experiment.

The plot appears quite formless but follows the episodic career of Voronin. First he works as a garbage collector, then an investigator, then as a newspaper editor and after that a counsellor – job rotation being a feature of the Experiment. Then, however, there is a fascistic uprising in which he lands on top of the heap. Later he leads an expedition outside the city to see if the rumours of gathering anti-city forces are true.

Throughout this, and all told with the Strugatsky’s trademark attention to detail, we see riotous kitchen parties, an invasion of baboons, and the City bedevilled by a sinister unidentified Red Building which manifests itself in different parts of the City, swallowing up its citizens.

Most of all the novel concerns itself with people. This feels like a man’s world where there is a lot of camaraderie between men as they jostle and scheme and dream amongst themselves and much of the writing consisting of intense dialogue. In fact a philosophical Jew, Izya Katzman, functions as the nearest thing the novel to a hero.

Worth it in the end.

Boris Strugatsky himself, in an Afterword, refers to the novel’s ` stubborn reluctance to glorify or acclaim anything` (p-461). Indeed, this is not comfort reading!

It was with a sense of duty that I turned the pages. Sometimes I leant in closer with a sense of intrigue. I chuckled once or twice at the slapstick humour and my pulse quickened here and there at the adventures and I knew that the creepy Red Building and the presence of Katzman would continue to haunt me. I was pleased to finish the last page and put the book to one side though.

As a science fiction `The Doomed City` falls flat. The cosmography is too meagre and the science background too thin for this to be a world that one can escape into. (Compare and contrast it with Philip Jose Farmer’s `Riverworld Saga` from 1971 to 1983. This dealt with a somewhat similar premise but constructed a much more credible alternate world in so doing).

As a novel about hypereality, however `The Doomed City` resonates more than ever, and not just in the Russian Federation. Also its in influence on many contemporary Russian writers, such as Dmitry Bykov, is clear to see.

Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris: The Doomed City (Translated by Andrew Bromfield) (Great Britian: Gollancz, 2017) All quotations are from this text.