"Cassettes are a new punk"

“Well done, Vitalik, well done. Today you are already 11 months old. February 9, 1971, ”says the invisible Papa Kosichkin with an agricultural baby under an old hat. The sound on the recording floats like cheese in the oven, and covers the listener with a sentimental wave of memories of childhood spent in the Docifrian era. Further in 36 minutes of the audio collage, in which naive home records, household noises and fragments of retro-hits are cleverly glued, we live 10 Soviet years with the Kosichkin family-dad, mother, Vitalik and Natasha. “Kosichkin Tapes” is the name of a family audio album mounted by the Novosibirsk musician Forestepe from a record accidentally purchased with a magnetic film; This is a temporary microbe, the explosive effect of which is enhanced by the fact that it is hidden in a black tape cassette - exactly similar to the one that was rewinded with a pencil, students who made a dociff era.

It is difficult to say what emotions are experiencing, twisting “Kosichkin Tapes” on the deck, a person from Japan or Australia, but there are such people because the Klammklang Krasnoyarsk label, which issued this entry, sends its premises to the most distant and exotic addresses. Klammklang, organized by a musician and linguist Stanislav Sharifullin , is one of the most noticeable Russian cassette labels, whose portfolio is seven releases with music, no less unexpected than Kosichkin Tapes; On February 16, the eighth comes out. Colta.ru talked with Stanislav Sharifullin about how his label arranged and why tape cassettes suddenly returned from the past.

Stanislav Sharifullin

Since childhood, when I still played with soft toys, I wanted to open a label. I had a notebook with square sheets that I spined on both sides-I painted the imaginary covers of the albums of imaginary artists, made track lists, invented discography. He interviewed the bear. Game.

Before Klammklang was Gimme5 - but it was not a label, but a party of artists with his specific music. Then I was just tired of this sound, and Gimme5 was over. I do not understand people who have been listening to the same thing all their lives.

We have every release - a bestseller, because everything is sold out to be clean.

Klammklang appeared in 2013, but a year after that did not work. It seems that initially it was such a local Krasnoyarsk joke about a label - although I no longer remember how it all started. The name is exactly a joke associated with Kafka and Kraftwerk , which I really love.

On Klammklang you can release anything, he has no concept. Rather, there is a task - to publish interesting dude who sit at home in their bedrooms and lay out cool music on Bandcamp . And then five people listen to her and buys alone - insulting.

The first cassettes we printed in New York. Seattle label, with which we made plates for Gimme5 , threw me the contacts of this office and said that it was good. They really did everything very well, but it turned out expensive. Then I began to "print" the cassettes at home myself. Well, how to print-I bought a hi-end cassette Deco Technics from the 1990s and began to rewrite. At first I found this model on Ebay somewhere in Europe for $ 500 plus delivery. I think good price. Already ready to pay through PayPal . But I decided to look at the Krasnoyarsk auction - I found the same deck for 1200 rubles. I’m calling a friend, and we immediately went to the right bank for her-this is such an industrial district of Krasnoyarsk, and we generally left for some slums. Garages, gloom, dirty entrances, my friend put a disk with a sweetie. How was the Japanese deck, which was produced not by the largest circulation in the 1990s?

The design of the covers of cassettes I do in Photoshop myself. This is very easy: you take a good alien picture or photo and take it two -color. I was recently written by one label from Scotland (or Wales) - they say, we want to create the same design, tell us how you do it. Is this silkography? I answer them: go to Photoshop , choose in the Image> Adjustments> Posterize menu, and then print on a piece of paper.

Five people listen to cool music and bought one - insulting.

We print cassettes with a circulation of 15 to 50 copies. We have every release - a bestseller, because everything is sold out to be clean. One cool blog, who writes about the embosses and neoclassicism, wrote a review of the album of Gali Ozran: they say, the music is beautiful, one drawback - print more copies. And we cannot make more copies, because we still have manual production.

We received the most reviews on the album of Nikita Bondarev . Mary-Enn Hobbs wrote to us about him-she praised, said that she wanted to put the BBC in her show, and put it. I don’t know how she came out on us. It is cool: in 2009-2010 I listened to her every release, because she had a bunch of new music. I even had a couple of vinyls with her collections.

The most exotic places where I sent the cassettes are Japan, Australia and Cheboksary. Sometimes it happens that the parcels do not reach: five or seven cassettes returned to me. Most often, the post office will shine or some gifted young lady will indicate his pseudonym instead of the real name. And at the post office, of course, they do not give the parcel - she returns, and she has to be sent again.

There are a lot of cassette labels in Russia, especially those that release music that I do not understand - punk, grandor, etc. Good of them are few. For my taste, the best cassette label in Russia is John's Kingdom , they are led by Pasha Milyakov, a good musician from Moscow. They have such dance-nantan releases, I really like it. Also, of course, Full of Nothing , which is engaged in the Petrozavodsk Love Cult , is almost the first cassette label in Russia with psychedelic electronic music. And there is a wild label, I don’t remember the name-they publish cassettes of some Chechen bard.

Once I ordered cassettes in Britain, and they sent me a pack of gold cassettes, 10 pieces. These cassettes are simply insane. I left them to release something special with a special super-limited circulation. Some savagery is a chanson, for example, or trapp.

I really love cassettes. It's cheap. There would be more money - Vinyl would print. But why all around them suddenly became interesting, I honestly do not know. Probably, cassettes are such a new punk. Cassette labels release such music that it never occurred to anyone else to release: you won’t write to Skrillex 'cassettes' huh?