Yegor & Opizdenevshiye - One Hundred Years Of Solitude (1992) 10/10/2008

I'm bumping this post after 8 months because a) I just re-ripped the CD in better bitrate so I'm replacing the long-dead link and b) the original post was made when pukeskywalkerblog was only about a month old. This is one of my favorite albums and one that left a pretty serious mark on my music tastes; personally I believe that in the future it'll be recognized as one of the greats in a more globalized canon of rock music. But I'm a dork.

Album got plugged a little while ago in an interview with the dude from Pink Reason.

The original post was made on February 21, the day Yegor was buried.

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Russo-Soviet punk/psych rock legend Yegor Letov was buried this morning after dying of a heart attack on Tuesday. He was 43. So ended the life of the man whom the eXile called "perhaps the last great genius of Russian literature" in an obituary.

Letov was from Omsk, an industrial center of some 2 million souls in southwest Siberia. He formed his first punk band, Posev (Посев, "Sowing") in late 1984. After a few short weeks the drummer's mother reported them to the KGB. The group was arrested and convicted of conspiracy to commit industrial sabotage. Letov attempted suicide in prison, was transferred to a psikhushka (mental asylum, in the USSR they were often used as holding places for political dissidents). There he learned to play guitar and drums, and after escaping he formed his most famous band Grazhdanskaya Oborona (Гражданская Оборона, "The Civil Defense") and lived a nomadic, illegal punk lifestyle until freedom of speech restrictions were loosened in 1989. He also released several solo albums and was involved in the side projects Yegor & Opizdenevshie (Егор и Опизденевшие, "Yegor and the Fuckups") and Kommunizm (Коммунизм, "Communism").

After the collapse of the USSR Letov struggled to find a new ideology and briefly fell in with Edward Limonov's neo-fascist National Bolshevik Party before adopting the stance of a "world Christian" and "ecological anarchist." In an interview a few months ago in the Russian edition of Rolling Stone magazine he lamented that politics in his country would never be anything but a "useless and foolish business."

This album, Sto Let Odinochestva (Сто лет одиночества, "One hundred years of solitude") was the second of three by the Yegor & the Fuckups psychedelia project and, in my opinion, the peak of his career. It was recorded in pieces in 1991 and 1992, just after the suicide of Letov's first wife the folk-punk poet Yanka Dyagileva, during a period when Letov spent most of his time wandering around the woods in the Ural region dropping acid. It's a powerful exploration of political nihilism and Slavic mysticism through punk energy and keyboard-soaked psychedelic rock.

We'll miss you Yegor. Пусть будет земля тебе пухом.

part1, part2