1990 - A Festival in Latvia

DJ Fonar:
«In the early 90s - I can't give the exact date - a DJ festival thundered across the Baltics. Lika and I couldn't make it there, there was a lot of work on. But the rumours about the event reached us pretty quickly.
British DJs came to this festival and introduced us to the vinyl aesthetic. At that time the whole Union was still working "on reels". The Balts had reached unattainable heights in this art. They had "Elfa" reel-to-reel tape machines - little coffin-like boxes with built-in consoles on which you could change the speed and even do scratches. It was done like this: you took the tape and simply ran it back and forth across the playback head. That was their know-how.
We had no such equipment back then. We did the same thing, but on cassette machines. Later, I think it was Lyosha Khokhlov who built a system similar to the "Elfas", but working on a different principle. We compared them, and it turned out they worked identically but were built in completely different ways.
These "reel-to-reel scratches" made an indelible impression on the Englishmen. They immediately invited our DJ - alas, I can't recall the name of this hero - to Great Britain, where he performed with great success at the DMX festival.»