1992 – Jump, Red Zone

DJ Fonar:
«It was the era of a new format of discotheque. Firstly, it became possible to operate at night. Secondly, there were proper bars where alcohol was sold. For people this was something new, and they happily frequented the establishments that opened back then, like The Red Zone, «U Lissa» or our Jump. Parties were thrown on a grand scale, six days a week. Jump could hold up to two thousand people, «U Lissa» stretched to half the size of «Olimpiysky».
The entertainment programme of these discos was classic: two acts a night, with dance blocks in between. But upbeat ones already, no slow dances.
Those were fun times. The core audience was made up of people with crosses and guns, real gangsters. They came with mobile phones that wouldn't fit on the tables, in fashionable crimson blazers. These people were making crazy money, and they spent it with pleasure. Going to the disco was an obligatory part of their cultured-leisure programme.
Of course, this crowd was dangerous and unpredictable. There were incidents that can't be forgotten. For example, we come out of «Jump» in the morning, me and Spider, together with some waitresses we knew. A five-hundred-series «Mercedes» pulls up to us, and a classic gangster mug tumbles out of it. «Matryoshkas», he says playfully to the girls: «How about a bang?». Jokes like that were par for the course. Carrying a girl off from the disco by force – that happened all the time.
Against this gangster backdrop, Jump was the most alternative disco, considered a «youth» spot. In large part, I hope, thanks to the efforts of Spider, Fish and me. When Igor offered me this job and asked whether I had a team capable of running a disco, my condition was defining the musical format. Igor took on the concert programme, I took on the dance part. I got the chance to be a preacher and to promote the music I liked.
We bet on European club hits. A set usually started with light hip-hop, then moved on to electronic music. It was the progressive MTV format – Depeche Mode, C&C Music Factory, the new beat style that shaped modern techno.
Of course, this music didn't suit everyone. There was the time when the owners of Jump showed up and insistently, with a pistol to my temple, asked me to put on some nice song. But I was a man of principle, and I refused. This went on for about twenty minutes, to the great dismay of the club security, who were completely at a loss. You couldn't rough up the big shots, but they didn't need a corpse in the disco either. Luckily, it all worked out. In the end, they shook my hand and said «Stand-up guy, respect».

A. Troitsky:
«What happened next was a sad but entirely predictable thing. Our gangsters, seeing that these were highly profitable events, simply laid their paws on the whole rave movement.
The transition to gangster raves happened completely organically, in full accordance with Marxist-Leninist teaching. I'm not sure the crew was present at «Gagarin party», but at Mobile and TechNoire they were definitely already there. Either they went there on their own initiative, taken in by the advertising, or their dolled-up chicks dragged them there, saying that «Mirage» was no longer cool. They found themselves in that atmosphere. They saw that it was all fun, sexy, druggy and profitable, and immediately created their own clones.
Right then, in the spring of 1992, ugly clones of these refined raves sprang up, all sorts of places like Red Zone, «U LiSSa» and the like. All these spots were originally created by gangsters for their own amusement, for distributing harmful substances and earning large amounts of money.
There was no particular upheaval in this. From an aesthetic point of view there wasn't much difference between rave and pop. That same «Mirage» and «Laskovy May» were Russian folk felt-boot techno. It was performed on exactly the same sequencers and Roland 303s as classic Detroit techno. The whole difference was that in Detroit there was instrumental music, while here they sang about white roses over the very same sounds. There was no antagonism at all.
Serious money was spinning around here, and the first Petersburg crew was instantly pushed aside. Vanya Salmaksov was killed, Haas took up design projects, Tsodikov went off into peripheral projects».