Viktor Tsoi - there is no death

Honouring the life of the big musician Viktor Tsoi (died in 1990 in a car accident at the age of 28), last year his son Alexander managed to bring a project to life, in which the original members of the band Alexander Titov, Yuri Kasparyan, Igor Tihomirov, curated by Tsoi’s son Alexander, they play new arrangements of songs, keeping the original vocals by Tsoi. One revolutionary project that instantly made Tsoi’s music modern. 

Our personal story with Viktor Tsoi and the band KINO began in the beginning of the 90’s, as we watched his “In Memoriam” concert on an old TV. 
There, while the eternal song "Kukushka" was playing, graffiti appeared, written by Boris Grebenshchikov - the discoverer of Tsoi and KINO: "There is no death - I'll see you after the concert.”

A little bit later in the 90’s, we have a different sweet memory, connected to Tsoi’s music. During a summer evening it the cult Sofia punk club “The Mud”, we got into a conversation with the person playing the music at the bar - a character, as if from a book by Victor Pelevin, carrying his musical treasures in a bag. While we talked about music, he opened up his bag and the first CD he took out was by KINO. After that, he told us about his most recent hallucination after the use of whatever substance, in which he was being chased by a trash bin on a local street, all while listening to the song “Trolleybus”.  

So much about the memories. And we listen to Tsoi today with the same excitement, because the music and the messages of each of his songs, at least for us, remain intransitive. 

Which makes the experiment of the musicians from KINO interesting - an embodiment of the challenge of the new age to combine the past and the present into one. Thanks to the art, things are possible, and in our opinion the experiment is successful - Tsoi is alive, there is no death!

As a result, today we listen to the whole live gig by the reborn band KINO.

Cool, laconic, and contemporary - by the words of the musicians themselves. 

March 2021

Image ©MA