Translated by Tatiana Rudyak
I have wanted to be a rock musician since I was about eight. When I was eleven, I took a guitar and a tape recorder and recorded about 20 albums in a row. The band was called Verzavok Kopal, it consisted of one person, and it was named after a phrase from a cult (among that same person) book Kostya Ryabtsev’s Diary. The lyrics were drafted on the go, the titles were taken from the surroundings: an album called Geometric Cities came about thanks to a Soviet film on the future of space exploration, and the album Dead Doctors Don’t Lie, - because it was recorded over a tape Dead Doctors Don’t Lie that contained some American naturopath’s and antivaxxer’s preachings, that came to our house from god knows where.
Later, my friend Tosha (who is now a famous musician Anton Maskeliadze) and I started a band called Drowned Newt, and even later my friend Tema and I - a duet called Let’s Go For A Drink. And later still, when all those projects ended, I thought I still wanted to create and record songs. That is how Verzavok Kopal stepped from the tape era straight into the digital one, and these two songs have a chance to increase my audience hundred-fold. They are about realness, about doing things your soul wants, and about being ready to defend something unremarkable.