Halloween 2003, Two Weeks On

So what have we got? An abundance of moments painstakingly documented for eternity (photographs, plainly speaking), into whose magical space the eyes and lenses of 44100.com fell that night, and which are very hard to put in any order. Chaos will never die, as it proves with hellish annual constancy in the very agony of the October bacchanalia.
Into the back-alleys of Moscow come all the top heroes of our childhood fantasies: Baron Bluebeard, the lecherous pontiff Leo X, the sex idol of 80s teenagers Freddy Krueger, the debauched nurses from "Re-Animator", genuine Haitian zombies and other such vileness.

And in accordance with the laws of ancient black traditions, they try to convince us of the authenticity of their origins and of the enthronement, over the best city on earth, of Baphomet himself, who had chased to hell and gone from his cosy seat the beloved mayor who had done so much for the development and popularisation of club culture within the Muscovite principality.
But, alas, a couple of little bottles of Veuve Clicquot cleared our minds, our eyes and our lenses, and behind the wealth of stage props from the Bolshoi Theatre and Mosfilm, and behind make-up unheard of even by Moscow standards, we saw the faces - beautiful in every respect - of our friends, mates, lovers and mere acquaintances. And for a second it seemed that because of this discovery the whole celebration had deflated, that the ever-changing world of magic had turned its back on us. The mystical extravaganza had given up the ghost. But only for a second, for we had forgotten about the music and the people who deliver it.
Nobody turned any back on us at all; on the contrary, it flashed us the seductive, genuine smile of Bulgakov's Margarita, along with all those charms that lie below. And it flashed far earlier than the appointed hour - to be exact, on the very last night before the sabbath.

It was then, in the underground passage between Dmitrovka and the Garden Ring, that an analogue of the aforementioned Bulgakovian heroine appeared, by the name of Lady Miss Kier Kirby. To her belongs the joy of opening the capital's ball in honour of Halloween. Forgive the inelegance of the phrase, but this woman, possessed of a gorgeous voice (which you can admire - just remember the tantalising phrase Deee-Lite and go hunting for it in every record shop) is herself a walking Halloween. For which a reproach to the Moscow promoters who could not be bothered to invite the lady into more comfortable premises on the capital's main night.
Yes, Layo & Bushwacka and Nick Warren with Funkstar De Luxe, raising hell across the Saturday city - those were sparks before the eyes. But the feeling left in the heart forever belongs precisely to the beautiful lady praised here. The best foreign musical collection of the departing autumn (2 Many DJs aside) was presented by her, for which a deep bow.

And what of Saturday? All that mattered was that there be an occasion! And the occasion, by that time swollen to the most infernal proportions with a clearly expressed desire to explode and scatter across Moscow throngs of ghouls, vampires, mermaids, fairies and assorted werewolves, thereby formed two principal hotbeds of debauchery, conducting between them a permanent exchange of the townsfolk's bodies and souls.
Zeppelin, playing at industrialisation, revelled in the building of a former grain elevator (the future club Gaudi) on Savyolovskaya - right next door, incidentally, sits a splendid cemetery. Accordingly, everything unfolded in an extremely brutal and harsh manner, but with a very soft subtext. A trash-show that certainly left no one indifferent, staged by Yepifantsev and Shishkin. A choir of blind boys, Nikolai Baskov, white swans devouring the flesh of Boris Godunov, and Mickey Mouse - these were the heroes of this novel. Nick Warren, drawing a bulldozing bass drum out of his records, gazed tenderly at the dancefloor; the stripper-girls with childish eyes, trying to act depraved, were afraid of something. Of Viy, apparently, who on his appearance turned out to be a plump Pokemon, a la an elderly Pikachu. And the painted-up crowd itself trod ever so tenderly on one another's feet.

"XIII", turning out a touch more mannered, chose a venue that remembered the endless drinking-bouts and orgies of the legendary Prince Golitsyn, and brought there a Swedish-American star by the name of Neneh Cherry together with DJs known by name to all of clubbing Moscow, Layo and Bushwacka, thereby knocking many of them flat. The gorgeous mulatta, alas, we did not catch, for the evil forces toyed with everyone who refused to sit still that night. We missed her, to our own shame and that of the British DJs. Only a mannered fat man by the name of James Fierce smiled at us a couple of times amid a setting of rotting oak barrels and stylishly-grimy walls that did not remember their own origins. And he dropped a couple of curious dancefloor numbers, like the new, extremely lyrical little song from Masters At Work - that was the toast to the living; the toast to the dead came in the shape of a trash-theme from Helloween girl #2, Christina Aguilera. The morning set from DJ Kolya granted fresh strength and left the most pleasant emotions.

Betraying itself, Saturday turned out not to be the most pleasant day of the week; besides, the celebration had more or less been feted out and the demons had already sucked out all the juices... But the PR management of "Mio" put about a tasty rumour of a possible secret visit to the mother-see by Richard James (aka Aphex Twin), among the other announced guests. Which, restoring our strength, compelled us to visit the aforementioned establishment - simply to satisfy ourselves that the rumour was a pleasant one, and to bring our personal Halloween to a close after all, listening to a no less pleasant, if slightly infantile, youth running the DMX Crew project, and then to head off to SLEEP....