Autumn 1994 – the Birth of Ptuch Sound System

Igor Shulinsky:
«At the end of 1994 Ivan Salmaksov joined our circle, a man of a completely Petersburg cast of mind. In Moscow he was disliked for this and taken a bit painfully. By that time Moscow was already divided into clans. There was Mamedov, who was in charge of trance music. There was Fonar, who headed the pop-house direction. There were Volodya & Art, real «matryoshka men» who played everything under the sun. And there was us, who'd earned a reputation as a kind of intellectual larvae.
We gave Salmaksov the financial base to realize his projects, which was also taken rather sharply by those around us. Unlike Fonar or Timur Mamedov, he didn't have to look for money. Salmaksov took to curating the intellectual-electronic scene.
Soon his own circle of people formed around him – Kompas-Vrubel, Zorkin, Yozh and Django, a middling British DJ who was nevertheless received very well in Moscow. This subsequently became the foundation for «Ptuch Sound System».
The first «test run» of this project was on Bogdan Titomir: they took a pop star and converted him to their faith. Then all this fizzled out into nothing, but the experiment was amusing».