Yanka Dyagileva

Perhaps one of the most difficult, disturbing, and hauntingly beautiful voices of Soviet rock and roll, Yanka Dyagileva found prominence just after her 1991 suicide, when ratings of bootlegs and concert recordings rose to the top. Her intimate and creative ties with Grazhdanskaya Oborona — creator and Russian punk rock and roll instigator Egor Letov — designed both her lifestyle and legacy as initial female of Russian punk, while her folkloric lyrics and melodies inform a relatively different tale. Reissued, remastered recordings reveal deep, foreboding basslines that rumble like faraway thunder behind Yanka’s pressing vocals. Tentative acoustic guitar riffs hit out and fizzle, but her vocals persist, encircled by jangly, abrasive instrumentation, as well as the angst-ridden sounds of the parallel motion: Seattle-born grunge rock and roll. Yanka’s anti-social character and similarly anti-social texts covered her fate like a digital unfamiliar during her life time; she was suppressed from the Soviet program, which controlled usage of all saving studios. Yana Stanislavovna Dyagileva, recognized to all as Yanka, was created in the Siberian town of Novosibirsk on Sept 4, 1966. Her parents mentioned and nourished her creative talent from a age. Her first influences, dating back again to her college days, included English poetry as well as the tunes of Boris Grebenshikov. In 1987, Yanka first produced the acquaintance of Egor Letov, a popular politics troublemaker and creator from the punk rock and roll group Grazhdanskaya Oborona. They spent the summertime and fall hitchhiking in the united states, holding impromptu shows and recording classes. Yanka’s first general public appearance was at a punk event in the Siberian city of Tumen, where she performed beneath the name Velikiy Oktyabr (Great Oct) with Letov, guitarist Igor “Jeff” Zhevtun, and drummer Evgeniy “Jackson” Kokorin. The group’s renditions of Yanka and Letov’s collaborative functions, Ural ballads about a friendly relationship, like, and indolent Soviet youngsters, reflected even more Yanka’s encyclopedic understanding of Russian folk music, than Letov’s penchant for punk rock and roll. Yanka herself, with her spacy gaze and iron-straight, waist-length locks, was the embodiment of a lady devotee from the ’60s American folk revival. The set documented a muddy bootleg known as Deklassirovaniy Component (“Declassed Component”) in an area amateur studio room, a basement installed with a vintage Saturn tape recorder. Ultimately, their hitchhiking circuit established them down in Leningrad (today St. Petersburg). Yanka’s homemade recordings experienced trickled south towards the rock and roll capitol, where underground locations, mostly house displays known as kvartirniki, impatiently anticipated her introduction. There, as with Moscow, she exercised an inescapable magnetism to viewers that drank in her every agony. Regional press known as her a siren, a sensitive miracle, as well as the Madonna of rock and roll. From 1988, her writings became even more abstract and sinister, fixated on imagery of high buildings and dropping. Often, she published from a male perspective. In January of 1989 the reclusive vocalist performed her first general public concert in Moscow. Once again in Feb she performed with Letov in Leningrad, this time around at a romantic memorial concert for suicide casualty, poet, and vocalist Alexandr Bashlachev. The rock and roll poet was an excellent impact on Yanka, plus some say, an individual acquaintance aswell. She was at that time a member from the Leningrad Rock and roll Club, performing regularly, though usually with Letov and hardly ever greater than a couple of tunes at the same time. At one particular concert, dissatisfied with her amateurish music group, she broke her electric guitar in the stage and strolled off. It could not need been a lot of a declaration in the western world, however in Russia it had been enough to acquire her the moniker of “Female Punk.” Early in 1991, Yanka documented four dark, troubling monitors: “Vyshe Nogi ot Zemli” (“GREATER THAN My Foot Above the bottom”), “Na Doroge Pyatak” (“On the road of My Heels”), “Pro Chertikov” (“Of Devils”), and “Pridyot Voda” (“WATER Is Arriving”). A springtime tour was prepared for Yanka with Boris Grebenshikov, but before its initial leg, the vocalist, complaining of despair, returned house to Novosibirsk. ON, MAY 9, the storyplot goes, Yanka went for the cigarette in the woods by her house, never to come back. Days afterwards her body was within a close by river. Her presumed suicide precipitated an avalanche of created and sung tributes, and a wide discharge of materials hardly ever publicly released in her life time.