Recently put this out on the BARELY HUMAN bandcamp, a bootleg 'reissue' of an incredible pair of recordings from Soviet post-punk project VOVA BLUE & THE BROTHERS IN MIND (Вова Синий И Братья По). Have been obsessed with this group for a good year or so, and truly hadn't heard anything like this before... these recordings were uploaded online but until now were only ever released as reel-to-reel's back in the '80s. Would love to see this done justice with a proper release, so I feel like this little DIY tape run might help bring it back into the world somehow.
I've got about 12 left and won't dub any more of these, but head across the BARELY HUMAN bandcamp if you're interested, or email me at max@barelyhuman.info if you wanna package some other items up from there (the BH book, some old label stock of 7"s and LPs, that kinda thing) and save on postage.
More info below....
Вова Синий И Братья По (VOVA BLUE & THE BROTHERS IN MIND) began as the underground recording project of Vova Siniy and his collaborator Igor Shaposhnikov, raised in a town that was, in the early 1980s, known as Chelyabinsk-70 in the USSR. The town (which had previously been named 'Residential Settlement Number 2', Kasli-2, Chelyabinsk-50 and is now named Snezhinsk) was a secret: a no fly zone that didn't appear on maps until the fall of the Soviet Union, and a major hub of the USSR's nuclear weapons program. But while Vova Siniy's father designed nuclear warheads in the town centre, Vova himself found a way to make music independently at home, with the leading question of: "how do I make music without musical instruments, without like-minded people and without money?"
To do so, he designed a rudimentary tape loop set up that he ran into a mixer, overdubbing instrumental sections, field recordings and cynical vocals that he sang over the top of western pop, rock and post-punk recordings that had been banned by the USSR's censors. These artists ranged from NEW ORDER and THE THE to THE B-52s and GRACE JONES, musicians who were among many western artists who were banned for sale in the USSR due to their supposed promotion of sex, violence, anti-communism, cults of personality, religious fanaticism and/or fascist imagery. To circumvent the censors, local smugglers would bring mislabelled tape loops across the border, or go so far as to make flexi-discs out of X-ray images to import for 'medical training.' These illicit recordings ended up in Vova Siniy's hands, and he used his DIY set up to take hooks and samples that spoke to him, singing over the top in Russian to create VOVA BLUE & THE BROTHERS IN MIND.
This bootleg cassette tape contains two recordings that were self-released by VOVA BLUE in 1985 as 7" Cinereel's: Молчать! ("Be Silent") on Side A and Игра Синих Лампочек ("Game of Blue Bulbs") on Side B, alongside a mini-zine with some context about the band as liner notes. To the best of my knowledge, these recordings have never been re-released in physical form, and only seem to be available as bootlegged digital recordings online. Due to the nature of dubbing cassette audio from low quality bootlegs, this is very much a low-fi release, but until the original masters are uncovered, this tape acts as a way of re-circulating these lost gems of musical history and celebrating the innovative DIY subversion of Vova Siniy and his collaborators.
