Фонарь

At the end of 1996, two Moscow musicians, Boris Nazarov and Arkady Martynenko, who had known each other for quite a while, decided to play together. By this time, Boris had managed to sing in his own pop-acid-jazz group УКВ, while Arkady was a seasoned professional, having gone through the Moscow Concert School, worked with Eduard Artemyev, and played keyboards in the ensemble Megapolis.

Like most electronic projects, Boris and Arkady began their collaboration with ambient improvisations and existed without a name for almost half a year. The name was prompted by an invitation to perform in the night broadcast on the Moscow radio station Substansia. At the same moment, the collective Detский Панадолл began to take shape, to which Boris and Arkady were invited along with other musicians. In a kitchen setting, the name Moscow Grooves Institute was born, and the duo performed on the radio. Thus, the group had its first program. After some time, a reworked version made it to the capital's label Citadel Records and was soon released on cassette as the album Surround Wednesday. In the autumn of 1997, bassist Sergey Belyaev from Панадолл joined MGI.

A distinctive feature of this musician was his incredible rhythmicity and precision of play, for which he earned the nickname 'Smooth'. The group practically forgets about non-rhythmic music and begins to write hit after hit in broken rhythms. Hip-hop, trip-hop, breakbeat, funk, acid-jazz, drum-n-bass, and much more. From the beginning of 1998, they came under the wing of Cosmos Production and began to rapidly gain popularity. Within a year, their second album Pizza was recorded, and several dozen concerts were performed. The best performances of the group took place at the Worldview festival at Kazantip-98 and at the 1999 meeting in the walls of the MAI House of Culture in Moscow. The group slightly expands its stylistic framework - on the one hand, composing a series of house compositions, and on the other hand, recording a modern interpretation of the romance Chrysanthemums in the Garden with vocalist Olga Rozhdestvenskaya.