Stuffography Oddball Spinoffs
Albums riffing off, exploiting, endorsing, condemning, celebrating or otherwise weirdly or even half-assedly relating to Akvarium and Akvarium-related matters.
Make no mistake. Most of these are dreadful. Or irrelevant. Or dreadfully irrelevant. A few of them have their moments. But most of them are turds...turds that fall with a splat unequalled since Dzhon's bout of Mongolian giardiasis. Water Rhapsody? Olga "7th Day" Perry's Innokenty adaptations? If you bought these, you are so pissed off you are not reading this right now.
In this category you'll find four basic types of albums:
- Albums by ex-members of Akvarium who are not BG (e.g. Kuryokhin, Romanov, Gakkel', Gunitskii)
- Albums where BG is featured in some absurdly tangential way. (e.g. Shakespeare's Sister)
- Albums (generally, by no-talents) that exploit Akvarium's back catalogue. (e.g. Water Rhapsody)
- Joanna Stingray albums. (The fact that J.S. was never in any official capacity connected with Akvarium is a fact of little relevance. See this review for some insight into the "Dzhoanna" phenomenon.)
(N.B.: This list, although already frightening, makes no claim to be exhaustive at the present time. There are literally dozens of these types of albums floating about—Kuryokhin alone must have 30—and we're adding more all the time.)
KINO's debut album is a brilliant piece of acoustic wonderment executed, mostly, on a cheap-ass Soviet 12-string. Several Akvarium members helped out with the project.
This is an unauthorized review of the album Это не любовь. Actually, let's not consider it a review, but an anecdote. By "anecdote," I don't mean un-funny joke in smoked-out kitchen. I mean anecdote. This submission form doesn't scroll text at the end of the line, so I'm going to write in verse.
OK, so the Akvarium connection is impressively tangential—Sasha Titov, bass-meister extraordinaire, was moonlighting in both groups at the time—but our own Mimoza penned a fine review of the album for our never-to-be-completed KINO site, and "waste not, want not" is the Bodhisattva Way.
Subtitled "But rocking not even 'til Tuesday," this Stingray effort exists on vinyl that should've known better.
Dedicated to Tsoi's memory, this no doubt had him rolling in his grave.
If you still haven't had enough Chucho Merchan and Olle Romeo, this is the album for you. Boris plays guitar with a collection of the least talented musicians of the 1980s. Woe woe woe.
Question: At what point did the musical careers of Boris Grebenshikov [sic] and Eddie Murphy intersect? Answer: When the "Radio Silence" video was slotted just before "Put Your Mouth On Me" in the Columbia Records Compliation Reel #47 Videocassette.
Stingray & Kuryokhin? Kuryokhin and Stingray? The tchoo meets the hairdo in this episode of the St. Pete TV variety show "Musical Ring". Madness. We can only imagine.
Shit rhapsody. A. Zubarev et al. record instrumentals of Boris' songs.
OK, admittedly BG's role here is entirely peripheral—limited to one duet with "the Pat Benetar of Russia"—but when confronted with this masterwork none of the Bodhisattvas could resist chiming in. Why? Because we all secretly want to have a duet with Joanna...
Kate St. John played on several Akvarium albums in the 1990s and Boris returned the favor on this album. Roger Eno also takes a bow on the record, which I believe is the closest we've gotten to a BoB major wish list item: Bryan (not Roger) Eno produces Boris. Ummm...that's not very close, is it?
Joanna Stingray, eternal avatar of Slavoyankish cross-pollination, weighs in with an ounce of rock and a pound of synth.
BG & Roth, Roth & BG. Aum...At least, that's what we thought. But it turns out to only have ONE (count it) track with Boris... and that's taken from Refuge. Buy it at Amazon.com if you're really hot for the super-groovy diagram showing how to do Yoga to Boris' song.
This addition to the blue-cover "Legends" series covers the work of Boris collaborator and Tchooomaster Kuryokhin. As affectionados of Tchooo, we recommend you purchase Kuryokhin in all his full-album glory, but if you're not ready for that you might start here. The collection wisely includes "Tibetan Tango" from Radio Africa, a song that has no Tchoos but features plenty of hoo hoo hoo hee hees. We approve.
A Dyusha Romanov tribute album. Dyusha was definitely a молодец...but do we really need this?
Part 2 of the worst idea Andrei Tropillo ever had.