Memorycemetery

As I had to clean my hard drive yesterday once again, I was met with the same eternal question: what should be wiped out from it in order to obtain some space? A picture from a distant while ago, to be more precise, 6 years back from now and thousands of miles apart came back to my mind: our house in Hanger Lane (Anger Lane, as Eugeny put it once and for all bypassers by chopping off a letter in the beginning from a wooden sign in the street, or Hunger Lane as it will stay in my memories). One of my dearest friends, Massimo AKA Badile in a white doctor’s gown, sitting in a chair behind a desk in his improvised “office”, established in the midst of bunch of his clothes, toys and paints, between scattered pieces of paper, drawings, food wrappings, wirings, cables, books, cups, canvases, breakfast leftovers and various traces of our house pony Zak’s recent visit to his humble headquarters (this list can go on forever). Badile is in a good mood. He wears googles with spirals drawn on lenses today. He looks out of this world, and, indeed, he is. With his pineapple haircut freshly done and big smile on a face he asks me:

- What is necessary, Boris? - referring to this universe of things compromising his inhabitat. He is in the mood for cleaning.

_ What is necessary? - I ask this question myself yet once again, looking into the contents of my little, 15 by 5 inches silver treasure box: a case, in which we put generously donated by Apollo hard drive, which once belonged to our desk top, which we left behind when …it’s a very long story, which goes without end, as that kids’ poem about a house which Jack built. This little silver enclosure is my black box, similar to a black box they would recover after an airplane crash, as it contains more or less detailed account of my last 5 years of life.

I leave photos, texts, drawings and films aside, and flip through the contents of my music folder, compromising over 6o gig of memory.

A wife of my brother once complained about him: they wanted to clean their house, and he decided to start from dumping his old tapes. She found him 4 hours later in the garage, sitting in his car and listening to them on a car stereo. I know this feeling. Though some of tracks that this file contains were hardly played by me again since I put them there, I still wanted to keep them, as there were reasons for putting them there in the first place: most of them were my memories. And so I randomly played them one by one, as saying goodbye to my dear friends and moments we shared together before we depart forever.

Because I had moved a lot and often, there are very few things which stay with me long. Thinking about, only music does. As I think once again about all the possible ways to map our memories, I come up with a picture of a city, surrounded by terra incognita, which  thorefore rather looks like an island with wide streets or rather streams of my life: Siberia (to which belongs and my hometown after we moved away; not in geopraphic, but in a practical sense, as it represents for me wast unknown void with few orientiers and few people living there: I succesfully secluded myself with chess and books in my room in my youth), Voronezh and my student years, Moscow, India, Moscow 2 (as it was an entirely different space inhabited by different people upon my coming back), London etc…

Little streets run left and right from those avenues, dividing those timestreams into little ones: as fish contains a backbone with smaller and yet smaller bones, my life or this memory map could be examined anatomically too.

Many of the names of that map would bear names of my favourite bands.

Maybe memory as a river would be a better example. It’s interesting to see how memory could be represented in all these different ways; let’s put random images of my liking I found in Internet together; you can replace the descriptive words with your own, if you like. I’d rather keep them unnamed, as they shift as the river does it’s bed from year to year:

As there are few ways to explore a landscape, I’ll switch from looking at imaginary memoryscape to its description: a bare name rarely means a thing. Referring to name of the place is alike referring  to people. A while ago I’ve overheard a conversation between 2 girls on a bus:

1: Who was there?

2: A guy with a red hair; the guy in a black T-shirt who talks a lot and a silly one.

What a great description was it! It still stays in my mind though few years already passed, and I doubt if blank names would. So, returning to my memories connected with music:

When I was 12 or so, I found on the top shelf of our closet burried under bundles of old magazines a case, covered with thick layer of dust. I took it down and opened. It was my father’s reel-to-reel taperecorder embeded in a box with a handle, so you can close it and carry around. It was made in early 60s’ I guess, a rare and desirable thing to have for that time. It was called ASTRA. This name stayed in my mind. I knew it was a latin for “star”, but why they would call a Soviet thing with an alien latin word was a complete mystery for me. Though it was just over 20 years old, it belonged somehow to Roman times for me.  We didn’t have any tapes though; I remember playing with switches, changing speeds and watching an empty reel rolling.

My elder brother worked at a school radiostation, and they were playing some music for school ice rink on  reel-to-reel tapes. I remember strange names of those bands they played: they were called Bananarama, Radiorama, and CC Catch, and a Russian rock-band Kino. Those were superhits, as Western music was scarce. Once a friend of his brought in a reel of Depeche Mode. It was “one of only 3 tapes in town”, as he explained. It was a revelation for me: I enterd entirely new and mysterious world. I never thought music could be so different; I never was touched by music before. I wanted to listen to it again and again. So I begged my brother to take it home just for one evening, after the ice rink would be closed, so I could listen to it. I remember how I was excited loading that Depeche Mode reel into father’s ASTRA very vividly, as it had happened just yesterday: you had to put a loose end of a tape between two rolls and magnetic head, fix it in a slot on an empty reel, fix the reels with the rubber things in place and roll it a bit.

I pressed START button. Depeche Mode began to play; faster and faster, it started to jam and chew the tape at once and finally ripped it. First 30 seconds of the tape were completely destroyed. I was in trouble: that was the only tape, and my brother borrowed it from his friend, who borrowed it from somebody else… We had to find a new one somewhere, but where?

My brother finally found a record studio which had this tape, so we had to copy it on a new one. It’s difficult to comprehend now, but at that time you couldn’t just go and buy whatever you wanted in Soviet Union. There was even a word for it: deficit, meaning something rare what you usually can obtain only on a black market, paying few times the price or in exchange for another deficit, if you could obtain this thing at all. First we had to find this deficit reel blank tape somewhere, and then pay some money for making a copy. Altogether we needed to find 12 roubles as I remember: 8 for counterfeit BASF tape  from Bulgarian builders, sneaking them together with training shoes, lipsticks and fake Adidas training suits for sale from Bulgaria and 4 for copying. He agreed with the Cosmos administration on supplying them with 3 such balls, at 15 roubles each. It is funny to think about it now, but destroying that tape was really a big deal. My brother couldn’t even go to school, as he had to return the tape, so he pretended to be sick. I still do not know why we couldn’t tell about it to our parents. It was quite a lot anyway: my father’s salary was 120 roubles, a ticket to cinema cost 15 copeeks and an ice cream 8. What he did was nothing short of genius: we just saw on TV one clip by ABBA. They were singing they song on a stage, surrounded by a hanging mirror balls, reflecting lights. So my brother went to a new entertainment venue in our city, a discoteque called “Cosmos”. He asked them if they want to have some mirror balls like in that clip. Then he borrowed some money from few of his friends, we put them together with our pocket money, scrapped all the resourses together and came up with 8 roubles some copeecs; so we went to a shop and bought few globuses, a mirror, a glass cutter and some strong glue. It took my brother 2 days to come up with the idea of this enterprise, and a couple of days for us to produce those balls, and a couple of days for finishing the deal: a stressful week of life for both of us in total.  We cut mirror in little squares and glued them to the dismembered from their stands globuses (a hell of a job, we had all our fingers cut and in glue, glass dust from cut mirrors was everywhere, as we did it secretly in our bedroom while our parents were at work). I remember mirroring Africa and Atlantic ocean and pulling a string to hold the thing through the hole for stand in the globus; and that’s how my brother discovered his business talents, as he was showered with orders for mirror balls at once: every respected place had to have one.

Two years later we bought a radiola (vynil player, amplifier and AM/FM tuner together); made in a Soviet Republic of Latvia at famous VEF factory. It also bore a name in latin lettering, and again something out of space: Sirius 204. This one was used to play first vynils produced independently, mainly Soviet rock bands of that time: Kino, Aquarium, Jesus Christ Superstar double, some songs by beloved by my father Vladimir Vysotskij, bootlegs from his young years, cut on old X-ray films as they were not published USSR (such as “Across the Universe” and “Lucy in the sky of diamonds” by Beatles cut on an X-ray of a fractured skull, whose one is a complete mystery) and some classics, such as Bach’s fugas and Quatro Stagnioni by Vivaldi. The best thing though was the tuner: again with my brother attached a 5m long wire, coiling around our room and serving as antenna, so we could listen to some foreign radiostations, such as BBC Russian service with Seva Novgorodzev and Voice of America in Russian. They were intercepted by powerfiul Soviet military radiostations, located along borders and transmitting noise on the same frequency, so most of the time you could hear just WooooooooooooWOOOOOOOWoooo sounds with faint music or voice in the background.

Finally we are coming to my first phonoteque.

It took me a while to arrive to this point; but my life feels as a long one, and going down time with my memory river I just follow it bends, as it flows freely. Everything we write deep down we write for ourselves and about ourselves; everything is memory. As you are welcome to get off of the boat of this post and stroll you legs on a more stable ground, I will continue. What I was heading to is my first real collection of music. I used to collect different things as a kid: Mongolian stamps (Mongol Suudan as they were called, available in post kiosks together with Cuban stamps throughout the country), then empty cigarette boxes from different countries, and classic cars pictures together with their technical characteristics cut out from a Soviet car magazine “Za Rulem” (’Behind the wheel” in English), and even dried flies in summertime for further chemical and anatomic experiments. Those collections were drawn rather by the intention to classify things or create an order, a complete picture, rather then passion (an exception being my first crime committed: stealing stamps from a boy I went to school together, but then I was rather jealous and didn’t want to share my secret of collecting stamps with anyone. I didn’t like that boy either: he was spoiled and was showing off what he had and others hadn’t-be it a digital water resistant watch with a calculator, portable electronic game where you had to manipulate a wolf catching eggs, a Japanese ballpen, or AC/DC jacket… Forgive me, Yura).

I lived in Voronezh city and studied at local university at that time. All my free money if I had any I would spent on books (most of them I’ve dreamt about to read then, being first time printed in Russia after collapse of communist ideology) and tapes. What an exciting time it was! Alas, I would never experience it again: after decades of total control and censorship I had to rediscover lost 80 years of world culture, not just random approved picks… I felt like I was invited to a plush banquet after starving for a long time, surviving on bread and water, or gulping for fresh air after being under water for a long time. “Real music” as I would call it, not cheesy pop tunes was still scarce and few. First it was coming through a friend of mine (not a close one, as we had an age gap and few things in common, apart of ”underground” music, publications, and all types of badly produced, translated and reprinted anarchist and out of mainstream books and films (such as Carlos Castaneda typed on a typewriter, one of the bleak copies being later reproduced on a rotaprint and binded, bad copy of Erasorhead by David Lynch etc.). On our first meeting at one of anarchist kitchen gatherings he was introduced to me as Korovin; he was a radical leftist journalist, widely known in narrow circles, as they say. He was hardly making his living in a small rented room in a rundown shackle house in the outskirts of the city. Whatever and God knows how he would manage to save, he would spent on music. He established few stable channels of supply back to Soviet years: with sailors of Russian trade fleet in Murmansk bying him vynils on his orders in Sweden and Denmark; with some other dissidents in Sankt Petersburg, exchanging desired tapes for vodka and fur hats from everdrunk Finnish tourists; with I don’t know whom else, as he was very secretive about the origins of his treasures. I have very fond memories of him: a humble hero always clad in the same leather jacket and black jeans, as he took great risks and lenghts in obtaining his collection and expanding it by exchange with others, pushing it to a colossal extent. There was hardly left a room for an old sofa and TV set in his room, the entire space covered with bundles of newspapers, magazines and his archives, and walls shelved with tapes and films. Through him my world entered Nick Cave, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Psychic TV and Genesis P Orridge, Iggy Pop and many other tapes with punk, gothic, experimental and electronic music and noise I used to play to distress of my neighbours on full volume days and nights through. In 5 years I have amassed a collection of nearly 500 tapes, carefully selected, labeled and much loved. On the day I left Russia as I thought for good, I organized an improvised potlatch party, called so after an Indian tradition to give away belongings: I packed what is necessary (hello, Badile! ) in one rucksack and invited all my friends to have a party together and take the rest of the things if they like. So it ended up in many different hands. The collection I have is very different now, and time is different too. So I let my memories go, one by one, until the next time and the Final Potlach.

Boris Kislisin

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