// Letters to YVYNYL //

slackers ☂ - ты приснишься мне (“I’ll See you in My Dreams”)

 / One huge benefit I get from my project here is that people write me from far away places and share stories of their wild adventures. This Moscow-based punk band told me about some incredible travels they took across Siberia on their way to perform at the Playtime Music Festival in Mongolia. That’s right. Mongolia. Now I want to go there, too!

Hey, Mark! 

During a tour show in Moscow, we played with our friends Nikola Tesla & Thee Coils in a small venue Ypsilon. It was summer and there was really hot in all ways, about 200 people were jumping and dancing, many of them came to us near the club after the show, wished to have a good trip, took pictures with us and hugging haha. We were hanging out for the whole night after the gig, no one went to sleep and in the morning we found ourselves in a van going to Nizhniy Novgorod. 

We were there before, it’s a very beautiful hilly city stood on two rivers, but the road there was the most terrifying in this tour. It was very hot outside and there were no windows in the van except the driver’s one, so you can try to imagine what it’s like to be there for 8-9 hours haha. We arrived there only in the evening and went to the scene almost immediately. But the show was ok, we ate some pizza, drank couple of beers, found the last drops of energy in ourselves and played rather long and strong. 

The next city was Ekaterinburg, it’s in the Urals that separates Europe from Asia so we took a flight there. The show was totally mad, there was no stage and people just went crazy and danced like hell, fell on our drums and equipment and also on us, took a mic and sang our songs instead of us while we played for them like karaoke, looked at each other and laughed haha. 

Then we went to Omsk on a train. Omsk is in Siberia and it’s a hometown of my bandmate Andrei, he has a lot of old friends there and he wanted to perform there for a very long time, to show me the city where he lived for more than 20 years - and so his dream came true! His friend met us at the railway station, we walked in the city, Andrei showed me different places from his childhood and teen age. In a bar where we played we met millions of his friends, the show was fun except one moment when I broke my cymbal. I was disappointed, but I quickly forgot about it, because we were having a very good time after the show with all of the audience and Andrei’s friends for the whole night.

The last city was Novosibirsk, we were invited there by Slava, he’s a barman in The Rooks bar where we played. We were there at 1 pm and testing all kinds of craft beer and cider till the evening when the show started. The Rooks bar is a very small place so the stage was outside, we played about 20 minutes and suddenly the police came. Two cops told us that if we continue playing they would call for reinforcements and all of us would be busted haha. We asked to play a couple of songs and after them they shut our gig down unfortunately. But we just continued testing beer and cider with our friends who came from another Siberian city Tomsk to see us, and the next day together we spent at the botanical garden. 

By the way, not long ago Slava invited us again to finish our set without cops haha. At this moment our final trip started. We had to get to Ulaanbaatar from Novosibirsk and it took more than twenty four hours. There were two flights (one 3 hours flight to Irkutsk and another 20 minutes flight to Ulan Ude over the Baikal lake with 5 hours waiting between them) and 12-hours bus to Ulaanbaatar. While riding on a bus and looking through window we could only see miles and miles of nothing, there were only plains and prairies outside, with horses, goats and yak from time to time and almost no men, only nature. 

The thing is that all of the bands at this festival had 4-5 members at least and had a very massive epic sound - that’s like almost all Mongolian bands sounded. But there is only two of us in a band, we have only guitar, drums and two voices, the audience didn’t dig it and we just vanished on that huge main stage, but it was fun aniway, we played about 50 minutes there. But two or three days later we had a solo gig there in a venue called “Temple” and it was really cool, the audience was at arm’s length from us, we always like it that way.

The whole Mongolian experience was really impressive, we didn’t know what to expect, but we met many interesting young people, saw and visited many beautiful places, including the Chinghis Khan monument and dinosaur park with stone dinos there haha. We became a real good friends with our promoter Oyunka, we were hanging out all Mongolian days with her, made funny interview on her radio show “Indie Thursday” there. And she visited us in Moscow in September for a week, we had a cool time. It’s a pity that we live so far from each other, I want to hope it wasn’t our last meeting. 

We arrived two hours later than we should and we were afraid that we couldn’t find each other with Oyunka but she recognized us, took in a car and we went to Playtime. That was the day before our show and we just had a rest after a trip, eating, smoking and drinking something strong haha. It was very strange and like a dream, we couldn’t believe that we’ve got there after all these hours of time and miles of space. We met a lot of people of all nationalities that night, Oyunka introduced us to The Radio Dept. who played there that evening, we met Ann, a Russian girl who lived in Australia for a very long time, then studied in Japan and turned up in Mongolia after all. We became friends and she also visited us with our promoter Oyunka in September in Moscow. 

Thanks god, our road to Moscow was just a one plane flight, I sat on my seat, fasten my seat belt and turned off for a six hours till the end of a flight. The tour was over.

Cheers,

Roma

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