Yanka's life is quite closely connected with the dormitory located in Novosibirsk at Krasny Prospekt, 155. This building in the style of Soviet functionalism, built in 1979, was intended for employees of the Kaskad company, which was engaged in the maintenance of military radio communications. Yanka's acquaintance with Valera Rozhkov (the younger brother of Alexander "Ivanich" Rozhkov, no less famous to all fans of Siberian existential punk), which occurred after the Novosibirsk concert of CIVIL DEFENSE in May 1987, had a significant impact on her further life trajectory: a year later, Valerych entered Yanka, who was almost homeless, into the room of Sergei Litavrin, who was absent almost all the time on official business. In fact, wandering between this room, the hut on Yadrintsevskaya and the dormitories of Akademgorodok, Yanka lived in Novosibirsk until the very end - of course, minus long trips around the country.
The history of Yanka's recordings would be incomplete without a noticeable segment of phonograms made in 1988-90 in room 710 by Valera Rozhkov and Igor Krasnov — in one form or another, they roamed from reel to reel, from album to album, spreading throughout the country along the arteries of Magnitizdat. Some of them are presented in this edition. The recordings were made on household tape recorders NOTA and ORBITA using OKTAVA MD52-B microphones, which naturally affected the quality, but as documentary cultural evidence they are certainly of enduring value.
The first block of songs, recorded in early May 1988, is quite well known: the song "Centennial Rain" was used in the posthumous album "Shame and Shame", and almost all the other tracks were released as bonuses to Yanka's Letov four-disc anthology. However, we are inclined to consider this recording as a valuable artifact in itself, fixing the program that was relevant at that time for Yankin and the general rather bright mood - for all the "cheerlessness" of the texts. Also, to preserve the atmosphere of the recording, all the lines between theand a couple of simple funny instrumentals.
The next session, five "heavy" songs, which are a kind of EP, which gave the name to the entire release, were recorded in the first half of March 1989, after Yanka's return from a tour to St. Petersburg, Moscow and Kharkov, and show us a completely different incarnation of her. Full of genuine drama, the heart-rending performance demonstrates the next turn of the spiral, which eventually led to a tragic finale. It is also worth noting the presence in this cycle of the only currently known acoustic performance of the song "Someone Else's House".
The illustrations for the publication are archival photographs taken during the session "Cross Zero" - as we can see, in addition to Yanka, Nyrych, Rozhkov Jr. and Krasnov were present by neighbors in the dormitory Igor Lyutov and Konstantin Zarechnev (who wrote the poem "Stress on the Syllable" on Yanka, a song - perhaps it is he sings it when tuning the microphones, and Yanka taps the rhythm on the canister). In addition, Yankin's old friend Kostya Rublev also looked at the light.
Ya-Ha, May 2, 2022.
