1990-1993 - The Petersburg Renaissance

Dj Digger:
"I ended up in this whole club life fairly by chance. In the early 90s I had just entered the Textile Academy, I had a lot of free time, and my friends and I quite often dashed off to Petersburg. There we once ended up at some "blat-khata" (a wheeler-dealer's flat), where I met Lyokha Kompas, Lena Popova and strange new music. At that point I was listening to psychedelic rock, whereas Kompas was already actively interested in electronic music, constantly trying to shove "mute" cassettes, with no author or publication details, into the tape deck. These were compilations, copied from mysterious records brought over by Afrika and Guryanov from America.
Gradually this music began to draw me in, and I, quite logically, ended up in the squat on the Fontanka. The flat looked pretty wild, roughly the way it was later shown in the film "Brother": a large space - lots of foreigners of some sort, all drunk. There were also turntables standing there, at which Haas and Gavrila worked their magic, performing manipulations that were completely mysterious to me. But it was fun and very unusual.
Gradually I began to export these cassettes from Petersburg to Moscow, and started looking for similar music around the recording studios, collecting various compilations. Back then I hung around at Stas Namin's studio. One day the sound engineer there, Oleg Saykov, looked at me attentively and said: "Some guys here are opening a club and looking for like-minded people. You like that kind of music, that tyntz-tyntz-tyntz - here is a phone number for you, give them a call." We got in touch. It turned out to be Vadik Polyakov and the club LSDance".