Boris Belokurov, frontman of the band "Solomennye Enoty"/from open source
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.)
In the 1990s, the band Solomennye Enoty (meaning ‘Straw Raccoons’) emerged as an iconic cult group at the forefront of Moscow's existential punk rock scene. The band's late frontman, Boris Usov, considered the last great and ill-fated poet of Russian guitar music, lived his entire life in Moscow's Kon'kovo district. Despite this, his imagination wandered to places and ideas as varied as Madagascar, Australia, Siam, San Lorenzo, and other Maracotian abysses and Phoenician cats.
This ode to a Gauguin-esque Tahitian girl from their penultimate album features a particularly phantom sound, which is a rarity in itself, as Solomennye Enoty, because of their rigid esthetic principles, never aimed for meticulous sound painting. Here, however, they managed to create the effect of the music flitting about like an exotic fish in an evaporating aquarium.
Rarely does a song encapsulate the stark separation between disparate realities as poignantly as this one, with lyrics like ‘This is how my working-class district closes off my Polynesia.’