My ears went missing / In broad daylight / And I became sad / Like a turkey, or an owl

Autumn, once again you’ve reminded my soul of what’s most important / Autumn, once again I’ve lost all peace of mind.

I love you for the fact that your expectation awaits / That which can never happen.

Here’s a song from the group Перемотка (Rewind) off their album Дождь прошёл в парке отдыха (It Rained in the Amusement Park).

Sticking with the “sea” theme for now, here’s another more obscure Viktor Tsoi song with an unexpected anti-war twist at the end.

Viktor Tsoi wrote quite a lot of songs in his brief life, and the vast majority are well worth listening to. At some point I wanted to post a few of the more obscure ones. Here’s one from KINO’s final album, the “Black Album.”

I was delighted to notice a reference to Knut Hamsun in today’s song. If anyone hasn’t read Hamsun, do yourself a favor. I also found an excuse to feature some Norwegian and Polish poetry.

Come see me / To listen to old records / The Divine Comedy, Peter Gabriel, and Sting / The world has lost its mind / I’m sick of everything that’s out there / Let’s listen to old records until morning

And if you suddenly grow bored by your affectionate light, / You’ll find room among us — there’s rain enough for everyone.

A hellishly black / Ear-piercing / Predatory / Despairing / Flock of sparrows is singing inside me.

Arise, arise upon the threshold, / Like a bronze sculpture, / Like a bronze crucifix; / Arise, arise upon the threshold.

I declare my building / A nuclear-free zone! / I declare my yard / A nuclear-free zone! / I declare my city / A nuclear-free zone! / I declare my…

Our hearts demand change, / Our eyes demand change. / In our laughter and our tears, / And in the pulsing of our veins, / Change! / We’re waiting for change.

In my view, AuktYon is the most unique and most innovative late Soviet rock band — their music is quite unlike anything else in Russia (that I know of), and I can’t really think of a single Western rock group that they resemble.

Here’s another nice song from the delightful Belarussian band Молчат дома, from their 2017 album С крыш наших домов (From the Rooftops of Our Buildings) — a line found in today’s song.

Pyotr Mamonov, one of my all-time favorites, died recently of COVID. All things considered, he had a long and productive life after being on the brink of death as a young man after some Moscow hippies he was brawling with attacked him with a sharpened file…

This light-hearted song is one of several by the 80’s band Секрет that remain well known today. The group referred to itself as a “Beat-Quartet” and hearkened back to an older kind of rock-and-roll.

This is a nice, funny song from Viktor Tsoi’s otherwise bleak final album, released posthumously; he had recorded the vocals before his tragic death in a car accident.

Here’s a well-known love song from Viktor Tsoi and KINO, the title track from their classic album 1985 Это не любовь.

Here’s one of many gems from Звуки му. It seems to be a series of phonecalls between girlfriends doing a post-mortem on yesterday’s “crude sunset.” Suffice it to say, their lips hurt.