Hummingbird Album Cover
Qalam strives to explore the interpenetration of different cultures. To this end, we have decided to launch a series of playlists in which music mediates between different geographical and ideological spaces. Our first playlist is called ‘West to East: One Hundred Best Songs’. It will be updated several times a week, and its curation will focus on how Western pop culture has reflected the realities of the East, whether they are musical, geographical, religious, or political. (The terms ‘West’ and ‘East’ should be taken as broadly and arbitrarily as possible.)
This song is a pseudo-Japanese musical wonder from the band’s first album Manner of Behavior (1991). Kolibri was a charmingly erotic epilogue to the era of classic Russian rock, which had largely come to an end by the time this album was released. The famous singer Zhanna Aguzarova had also left for America by that time, and there were no significant female voices left in the local indie scene. This was a void filled by Kolibri with their post-punk fem-pop cabaret with a distinctly St. Petersburg flavor peppered with a slight Italian influence. ‘Fuji’ is based on the captivating fretless bass of Alexander Titov, the bassist of Aquarium (and the producer of this record), and it is dedicated not so much to the Japanese summit as to the wife of Vyacheslav Polunin of the Litsedei (Mummers) group, who had that nickname.