What Are You Listening To?

[Ruby]

Trawling around the www listening to Aquarium. So, I lied; Navigator is not an instrumental album – it’s decidedly vocal! Very confusing – all this Cyrillic script. There's a site called Kroogi which lets you listen to all their stuff.

One of the reasons I wanted to listen to Navigator, apart from being curious about the music in itself, is because it is recognised as being of superior quality in terms of production. Boris Grebenchshikov and Aquarium spent so many years recording to a sub-standard, using whatever equipment was available because there was no other option, that when he finally got access to a decent studio, he went completely overboard on quality - to the point that he had to sell his car and some of his guitar collection in order to finance tracking costs. It was worth it. This is so gorgeous I swear I can hear the samovar singing …

(Google translate does a very shaky job of translating the lyrics so I can only hazard a guess at direction of those, but the subject matter of this track is “Toiling” – as is the title .… any irony, of which there is apparently plenty, is totally lost, which is a pity; I need to go learn Russian now – )

[video=youtube;ESSrjo3zw0g]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESSrjo3zw0g[/video]