Phantom of the Underground

A very independent festival “Velvet Underground” took place in Moscow

You won’t believe it, but there is a musical performance in Moscow that is not dependent on anyone at all. This is a festival called “Velvet Underground”, which has been going on for three years now. Three years in a row is not God knows what an achievement in terms of big show business. But if you consider that the entire festival, a multi-genre event (concerts, poets, fashion designers, body art, etc.), is done out of the blue, with virtually no budget, then this is an achievement.

All these three years, the “Velvet Underground” (the name of the group Velvet Underground has nothing to do with it) has been wandering around the clubs. This year the fest fit into the “1st Library” - a very nice, but very small club. There is literally no extra hanger to hang a fur coat. The concert hall is generally on the first floor. The organizers insist that certain media figures (from Oksana Robski to the politician Mitrofanov) come to them, but it seems to me that this is insignificant. It is important, I repeat, that some kind of enduring action is performed on sheer enthusiasm. Which, by the way, looks a hundred times more expensive than what was spent on it.

The festival was invented three years ago by Vladimir Preobrazhensky, the former keyboard player of the Obermaneken group, now the leader of the Boston Tea Party group, whose name will not tell you anything, and I sincerely feel sorry for everyone in this regard. Because Mr. Preobrazhensky sings wonderfully, and his plasticity is like that of a snake in a frying pan. We have only one or two such sexually flexible rock and rollers. Well, "AuktYon". Well, "TV". Who else?..

The ideology of the festival, according to Preobrazhensky, is a kind of “courtly decadence”, a combination unforgettable due to its meaninglessness. Preobrazhensky, as a person obsessed with sounds, notes and beauty, believes that there is nothing wrong with contradiction: “Such a fictional world. From courtliness - the cult of the beautiful lady, from decadence... well, everything else.” But no “underground” attitudes, no matter how contradictory, have ever stopped people from playing good, interesting music. What's the main thing in the underground? So that he was. And it’s only a matter of time before something good appears there.

Moscow at the end of the first decade of the 21st century is, of course, not an ideal place for the emergence of a new underground. But possible.

The organizers chose the “Library” club because it had the appropriate ambiance, and they weren’t worried about the number of seats, because “we simply couldn’t foresee that so many people would come.” I don't know what attracted the public. Maybe a promise of models from Penthouse magazine (by the way, there weren’t that many of them. It seems like there was only one). Maybe body art. I would like to believe that the main reason is still the musical part. For the sake of the festival, the once popular duet “Farewell to Youth” was revived. Previously, this group looked defiantly anti-format - even when there was no concept of “format”. This duet, in my opinion, formed and broke up before its time. They would have been more at home in the late Yeltsin era, when all sorts of student clubs with a bohemian atmosphere, democratic prices for inedible and diluted things, and the idea that romances were good, and swearing in songs “is a protest,” began to appear. “PM”, of course, is above all this surroundings. It’s just that the soil for this is better now. For ten years the duo of Tannenbaum and Yakushin did not perform at all, but they were told that “BP” was one hundred percent their event. The musicians believed and performed for free, although they specifically demanded that they bring a piano. Or at least a piano. The piano was brought, Tannenbaum and Yakushin performed two of their songs (“Quiet Evening” and “I Forgive Everything” based on Bryusov’s poems). On the second song, the vocalist forgot the words, the pianist got up and left. Someone should have shot himself with a toy gun and bled out cranberry juice. Then there would be complete decadence.

Alexander BELYAEV