Stauropygial Records

A depressive guitar album by R.A.Pavlov, recorded in the same period of suffering the humiliting office job, as the previous releases (XXXIV—XXXV) recorded one per day, yet this one was out with a delay. Simply chaotic guitar torment on the first side is alternated on the second with melancholic pieces in the spirit of the album Black Petal by Keiji Haino, yet without vocals — adding them would turn it into something like I would start performing 10 years later as a solo bard song set, with minor chords on detuned guitar and endless sorrow. The title is translated from Finnish as eternal hangover and reflects one of my common fears, especially those days when there were reason for it. In short, this is a very painful and tragical album, exactly as the life of every working man. One of the most modernist releases, I would say (or meta-modernist, as it's customary called now).

After Balalaika Noise, the next obvious step was Goosli Noise, merciless, furious and primordial noise played on Soviet children's goosli with a contact mic attached, a discovery of 2007 and later probably the most acknowledged West-oriented, matryoshka-style project of mine, as performances outside of russia were becoming more and more successful with time, along with the ones inside more and more failing (with a few exceptions like some of the gigs at Ruskomplekt and maybe once at Petrozavodsk, not really russia though). In s strange way, the very same year Goosli Noise appeared on 2 net compilations, despite all my contempt for this format: on the renowned Australian label Smell The Stench and native Aunt Mary Compilation, which included the whole first (anonymous) album. In the beginning of 2008 the first tour to Denmark took place, and a couple of months later the one over Slovakia, Slovenia and Hungary. The next, even crazier tour of 2010 over Greece (where the same model of goosli turned out to be almost in every house), Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia and Italy is described in my book Travels (Cherry Publishers, 2019).

A cassette edition of a compact disc, previously having existed in several copies of different artwork and without a band name or any other distinctive legends. I must confess that that's I who's mainly to blame for the promotion of an initially anonymous project by Kolya the Cruster (once a member of ANKYLYM's industrial lineup) exactly under this name, used by Kolya as his nickname. I usually durst not though to write the unreadable Ubijstvo Narkomany in the English context and named the band with the English initial equivalent. Recorded at a building site, with the talks of working people being heard along with noises of industrial machines. Definitely decent stuff, raw and primitive dictophone noise.

Circa the end of 2006 I had acquired a digital dictophone with broken USB output, so that the recordings could be extracted only via headphones, and started experimenting with musique concrete and field recordings. This tape represents a chronicle of my travels between Pskov and St. Petersburg made in russian trains and on railway stations. Explicitly shews everyday life of Russian people. Grammar nazis will curse this release for the preposition usage in the title not conforming to the Moscow literary norm.

The first comment on this album was: You have recorded music so awful as fucking a dead corpse — what indeed should be considered as one of my indubitable artistic achievements (and exactly conformed to my condition at that time because of the job, just as if the corpse were I). Despite being really that creepy, the sound is rather digital though, due the Behringer MultiFX pedal. Unbearable monotonous hum is diluted with only but accidentally found in the ends of the sides (and really appropriate there) pieces of an interview with some music entrepreneur of Muscovites. The life in the album-per-day mode (see the previous release) required a simplification of design unheard-of formerly, which is indeed observed here: single-sided cover on green office paper, recycled tape. Incidentally I have discovered recently some copies of this cover, so that the tape can be ordered again for 150 roubles.

In early 2007 I eventually returned to St. Petersburg after the unsuccessful year-long escape in Pskov, got fixed up in an office job and, out of grief, decided to record one album each day. I managed to hold out this regimen for 3 days, and here's the first release made this way, even the exact date is known: January 13. The recording represents a viscous and indigestible mash of bass and guitar improvisation with Szarapow (on the reverse side we seem to have swapped instruments) in the spitit of the project People Who Can't Play. This album does not even have a normal title, Szarapow just made a spontaneous cut-up and copied a piece of my novel The Travel Along Africa And Asia (1986), happened to come to his hand, on the reverse of the cover. Besides he couldn't refrain from putting there the myspace address, owned by me those days, to my shame. No longer distributed, having been recorded on a highly defective squeaky tape, dangerous to put in the recorder.

The Italian side is called Un pomeriggio all'orto botanico, Monopolka's side — Extreme pant pissing playout & sinister horror. Mondo Cane is a noise band of Luca Massolin (8mm Records label, Ponzano Veneto, Italy — a town with 9000 inhabitants), which had been touring all over Europe in mid-2000-ies, although there's almost no mentions of it in the Internet (Mike Patton's project is different). A typical situation for the South European underground, later I have met lots of outstanding offline bands in Greece and Italy. Ventolin Orchestra is Bruno Dorella from OvO. The stuff is really great, actually as of now I find it much more interesting to listen to a noise band than to a solo performance with effect pedals. I have offered them a split tape with Monopolka, probably because they had already been acquainted with Phil, who had had released a CD of Allun from the Barlamuerte label run by aforementioned Bruno. Again I invented an example of an incomprehensible cover perversion. The tape was, as it had already used to happen before, glued into the cover, however this time the paper was thinner and the size of the cover larger than the tape itself. It resulted in an unstable construct, impossible to mail without damaging. So instead of artists' copies I had to send to Italy only the covers and a reference on glueing. However I doubt that my explanations were understood. At least since that I have never seen or heard of this release in Europe.

Collectors' interest might be sparked by the fact that the tape exists in two variants. Living partly in Pskov and partly in St. Petersburg I had to prepare master independently in both cities to make copies. The difference between St. Petersburg and Pskov editions seems to be in the length of the last Monopolka's track, cut differently out of the original live recording. The version is indicated on the cover (at least for the Pskov edition).

It was some stupid so-called anti-release for CD lovers. The only good thing about it was the typewriter printing on the cover. Very ashamed of this item being in the catalogue.

Two excellent bands from Croatia and Lithuania. The former play crazy aggressive avantgarde grind and supplied a live recording, the latter perform some kind of instrumental grind with influences from actual music of the 2000s, like Ninja Tune bands and such like, their side consists of tracks selected from the first 2 albums (Pornokturno and Cyber Maire). It appeared to be not the best idea: just after the split had been out, TBT recorded splendid new album (Vilnius Qui Dort), that remained unreleased and totally unknown to the public, except for a dozen of promo copies. The existence of the band ceased thereafter: essentially it had already been a solo project of one man, a multi-instrumentalist, who changed names several times afterwards to settle finally on Erdvėje (see release LV). Everything was recorded on Tascam 424 cassette portastudio, acquired by me later from the same person, while before TBT it had been employed by such famous russian artists as Noiz MC and AZЪ.

This was the last factory-copied tape. Dark ages started for cassettes in russia until we founded GoTape in 2013.

A review in Croatian

Sold out, but I can make a copy with original cover. Covers for distros are also available.

As far as the sequence of events can be restored now, initially the name Balalaika Noise was assigned to the album #10 of my noise alias Stop Asking Stupid Questions. Then I released this tape, where Balalaika Noise was still apparently a genre, not the performer: the latter was specified as R.A.Pavlov for the Side 1, where I was playing Russian sailors' song Yablochko laxly, the other side being the Part 2 of the aforementioned SASQ album (looks like it has never been fully published). Only later, when two more tapes had been out, Balalaika Noise began to be understood as project's name, under which I performed soon in St. Petersburg, Novgorod and Petrozavodsk, as well as in Czechia during Ankylym's tour. Later in 2010-s the only gig with a drummer has taken place at St. Petersburg's venue Zhopa (Asshole).

Through the whole SASQ side the three-chord theme of Russian chastushka is varied in a number of ways, yet (like on other recordings of that period, overly productive at the expense of quality) it's still full of cuts and pieces from vinyl records, tapes, radio, my cries (later becoming a permanent feature of live performances of Balalaika Noise) and even something like a vacuum cleaner (but it might be balalaika as well) crawling from everywhere, all being processed by the awful delay of the post-Soviet despised mixing console Lel. A minimalistic cover is made of a piece of orange cardboard with a label attached, printed on an old-fashioned analogue typewriter Lubava, with which I had spend the whole first half of the 1990-s.