MIGZ 2009: MySpaceRocket

MSR: The name expresses nothing except our shared attraction to a cosmic aesthetic and the romance of science fiction. The idea, too, is hard to formulate, since it's not a project as such but a formation to which brilliant people sometimes attach themselves and then vanish again. In all, 8 people took part in MSR at various times, not counting joint tracks with various foreigners. Thus we've had the chance to work with Ivan Dope Pope, Miguel aka Vakula, Sibirtsev, Nina Kraviz, Ksenia Kulikova. And the genre was always different - from space disco to hardcore techno. Two features, however, remained constant. The first is danceability, the second is psychedelia. That is, the music always had some kind of psychedelic-hypnotic tinge. Not deliberately, mind you. The rule "as you name the ship, so it will sail" probably came into play. In short, we tried everything, and now we've settled on a genre that I call, for myself, "psychodelic disco".

MSR: Right now it's just the two of us, me and Cross. We perform like this: Stas is mainly on bass, from time to time launching loops on the drum machine or on vinyl. I play guitar, sing through a vocoder, control the synthesizer, twist the knobs, press the buttons and also launch loops... We write music together - we've been doing this quite successfully for a long time now, but not much of it.

MSR: Yes, it might seem that way. The thing is, we don't run the MySpace ourselves. Nina edited it at some point, but now everyone's forgotten about it.

MSR: Not yet, though we'd like to find a drummer and a singer; we've never worked with singers before.

MSR: The vocal lyrics always belonged to whoever sang them. If Nina Kraviz sang, then she was the author of the songs; if Ksyusha did - then accordingly...

MSR: Right now most of the tracks are instrumental, and at MIGZ it'll most likely be only me singing through the vocoder, that is, in essence a machine will be singing for me, but in a human voice.

MSR: We use whatever instruments come to hand: synthesizers, guitars, the voice, we sample old vinyl, and, of course, nice software plug-in synthesizers, which we also use in abundance.

MSR: We ourselves are actually the counterpart of a whole bunch of different cool projects. There's nothing innovative in our music, it's all rather the opposite - conservative. In Russia there's actually little of this kind of old-school, though there aren't many people keen on this music either, and if there are, then they're surely audiophiles sitting at home with headphones, listening to old records and unaware of our existence. Personally, I'd like to take my bearings from the people of the sixties, and not even in terms of sound, but in terms of that aesthetic - not the Soviet one, but the American-European one. Stas Cross is a conservative too, though that's understandable, he's old, after all.

MSR: There were, and we successfully f...ed them all up on account of our disorganisation and absent-mindedness. We're hot-tempered, unbalanced people; sometimes we shout at each other, tell each other to get lost so bluntly that it seems we'll never speak to that person again, and yet afterwards, centimetre by centimetre, we draw closer all the same and write music, but we don't push it anywhere. I don't understand why.

MSR: We perform in Moscow extremely rarely. In all, I think we've performed about five times, if I'm not getting anything mixed up. There was a good gig at a rave in Khokhlovsky Lane. I think it was one of our most successful performances in terms of emotion.

MSR: Depends what you count as material. Of finished tracks sitting ready on the shelf there are extremely few. Maybe an album and a half. But of tracks, sketches and compositions that we can only perform live, because the parts haven't been recorded, there's probably about 4 hours of playing in various genres.

MSR: As I said before - psychodelic disco mostly, a bit of old electro, a bit of techno. In other words, anyone who has ever once in their life "devoured" Kandinsky's paintings should appreciate it.