Artist: ZGA Vs. FIGS
Album: WHO HAS STOLEN THE AIR? (DIGI)

Year: 2006
Media type: CD

ZGA is a unique phenomenon in Russian post-rock music. There’s never been a band that would for so long, so consistently and with such dogged perseverance and dedication pursue the non-compromised approach to music.

ZGA pretty much equals Nick Sudnick. Throughout countless personnel changes Nick has always been there - the mind, the heart, the soul, the creator and inventor of this unparalleled music.

We first met in the early 80s. The newly born Russian rock strived for lyrical freedom and new spirit, music hardly mattered and in most cases remained quite simple. I, however, craved for weirder and stranger textures. Sudnick was a connoisseur and avid collector of Rock in Opposition and industrial: Henry Cow, This Heat, Test Department, Universe Zero. That was the shape of sound ZGA was aiming at.

“Zga” is a very obsolete, obscure and peculiar Russian word. It means something really miniscule and in the contemporary language it survived only as a part of an expression ni zgi ne vidno - “pitch dark”. ZGA’s music when I first heard it was by no means sounded obsolete but obscure it very well was: asymmetrical rhythms, hardly any melody, distorted guitar paired with Nick’s homemade instruments. They lived in Riga, and in 1986 I was proud to bring this unusual band for their first ever gig in Leningrad, then capital of Russian rock.

In 1991 Sudnick and ZGA moved to St. Petersburg. His studio in the legendary artists commune at Pushkinskaya 10 is a mix between a scrap metal warehouse, where he builds, solders, puts together his countless homemade instruments, and a makeshift recording studio. He’s also a curator of GEZ 21 - Gallery of Experimental Sound, the hub for noise and industrial projects.

Living in Pushkinskaya 10 and working at GEZ exposed reclusive Sudnik to a whole new range of people and ideas. He works on a number of side projects, one is producing an all female band IvaNova. Its drummer Katya Fedorova became a full-fledged ZGA member and brought more accessible and less austere timbres of female vocals, violin and accordion of her fellow band members into ZGA’s later albums.

Katya Fedorova is also a member FIGS, another very special project that is featured on this compilation. FIGS is an acronym that stands for the names of four musicians: apart from Sudnick and Fedorova there are two drummers: Alexei Ivanov and Marcus Godwyn, a Brit who has lived in St. Petersburg for many years now. The resulting band - three percussionists and ever noisy Sudnick with his homemade instruments - is an apotheosis of rhythmic industrial sound.

TRACKLIST:

1  Intro   
2  Neva Wave 4   
3  Glavnabor   
4  I'm Terrible   
5  Promenade #2   
6  Marziale   
7  Who Has Stolen The Air?   
8  It's Nasty   
9  Neva Wave 9   
10  Vanitas Vanitatum   
11  Con Slancio   
12  Neva Wave 7   
13  Enema   
14  Optical Illusion / Chilly Fireball   
15  Fatherland Of Elephants P.25   
16  Neva Wave 8