Life on Venus
WWC-30 Life on Venus
Hello again everyone, and welcome new listeners!
I thought I’d stick with the ‘shoegaze’ theme just a bit longer since a few of you have expressed an interest. Shoegaze occupies a tiny corner of the Russian music scene but its artists are among the most dedicated, especially considering that there’s not much money in the genre - just the love of one’s craft, which is what I look for.
On that note, allow me to introduce Moscow based Life on Venus.
Life on Venus began their voyage through time and space in 2016 with their self-released demo ‘Distant Lights’ and have since produced three full-length CDs as well as several EPs and singles. Their latest release was the full-length CD ‘Homewards’ in December 2022, so I assume they’re still in the picture.
The above photo presents the original line-up, but the band has had some personnel changes over the years and I haven’t been able to identify all the members by name and era. Life on Venus is now a trio consisting of Dmitry Kostryukov, Oleg Kopytin and Gulya Tukshaitova. I understand the difficulty trying to keep it together with all the demands life places on us, but hopefully at some future point they’ll be able to regroup or add new members. Original members are listed below.
Dmitry Kostryukov - guitars and vocals
Oleg Kopytin - guitars
Marat Yuskaev - bass
Gulnara Tukshaitova - drums
Alina Heiremans - vocals
Elizaveta Startseva - vocals
Here’s a good interview in English with one of the band’s founders and main song writer, Dmitry Kostryukov. For once the interviewer inquired about the band’s name, which is a pet peeve of mine since they hardly ever do that.
"I used to find a lot of inspiration in irrational things, those ones that just can't ever happen. We were talking about these with a friend of mine a long time ago, coming up with those improbable phenomenon. I can't say sure if it was me or him first, but I can remember us telling two of these one after another: 'sunny nights', then 'life on venus'. And if the sunny nights are real, (so-called white nights in Saint-Petersburg), life on venus must be one of the most surreal and unbelievable things ever. It reminds of the childish dreams we all had, about reaching distant places and exploring the universe, fearlessly facing the unknown.”
I’m glad he asked because when I first heard this group I wondered if their name was inspired by the Soviet Venera Missions. Apparently not, but no matter because I sense a kindred spirit in Dmitry Kostryukov. As a child I was interested in anything to do with space exploration, as well as a voracious reader of science fiction, both of which were popular in the USSR at the time. I’m glad to see that the spirit of exploration hasn’t been lost with all the changes since then, in fact there’s another Venera mission scheduled for 2029, which will be the 30th of its kind.
The Venera Missions are the epitome of stubborn determination typical of the Russian spirit. The first few missions were almost complete failures but they kept plugging away at solving the most demanding of engineering problems, given the hostility of the Venusian environment. If you got an hour’s worth of data before the atmosphere destroyed the craft you were doing well, and yet the program added massively to our knowledge of the planet. I’m sure there’s an analogy to shoegaze in there somewhere if I could find it. Never give up? That was the title of a song by Fraunhofer Diffraction a few programs ago. Words to live by I would say.
As an explorer myself, I couldn’t resist going down one rabbit hole I found while researching this program. I happened across a tune called ‘Mice on Venus’ which immediately reminded me of Mouse on Mars, one of my favourite electronic duos of the 1990’s. I’m sure it was a reference to them. Gamers are probably on to this stuff, but it was a complete and pleasant surprise for me. Turns out there’s two full CDs of this material by ‘C418’ who wrote the music for Minecraft, so lots to explore there.
Technical notes: You’ll notice a certain amount of distortion and fuzziness on some of the tracks. It’s hard to avoid this with shoegaze, which has wide dynamic range and very rich harmonics. Some of it is intentional and inherent in the style, some of it is just the limitations of the studio and the skills of the engineer. In shoegaze you do the best with what you can afford.
What this means for me is some hard choices about what to include, what to leave out, and how much editing to do. My philosophy is to make as few changes as possible, but some level and EQ adjustments were unavoidable. If I lived in Russia I’d make a serious effort to bring these groups together under one roof, with a first-rate studio and promotion to get them more exposure. Something along the lines of the 4AD label in the UK. Of all the trends in contemporary Russian music I feel this is by far the most interesting. It comes straight from the heart and shines right through.
Speaking of heart…
This site is free and always will be. The only thing I ask of my listeners is that they consider the occasional small donation to my chosen charity. Chosen because they have the lowest overhead of any charity I’ve looked at, and because the money they generate goes where it’s needed most, which right now is Gaza. The link below will take you to their Canadian site, but they have operations in the UK and USA as well.
[Evie] I believe young people today use the expression 'omfg' to designate sentiments along the lines of 'wow'.
Katrina didn't tell me about this amazing band. Now she is telling me. She'll be providing a comment in due course. But for now, all I can say is, LoV are astounding and just as good, if not better, than Slowdive. Katrina would say they're better. But she's biased (more on that later).
Totally amazing and totally beautiful - thank you!!!
That 'mouse on mars' comment just occurred to me given the faked NASA Mars rover images, one of which includes some kind of rodent: https://www.marsanomalyresearch.com/
So whilst I have total doubt about NASA, I'm still seriously hoping that the Russians didn't stoop to faking anything. Personally, although this may be cognitive bias, so to speak, I am going to genuinely believe those Venus images are true (unless someone like Miles Mathis can prove me otherwise). In the words of Fox Mulder - I want to believe.
The issue with the Mars thing is that the atmosphere is so much thinner that any lander would need a massive amount of retro-thrust in order to brake and so on, meaning a seriously large payload, which goes way beyond the mission specifications. Venus is very different indeed, being a very thick atmosphere, so simply using some parachutes, as with the Venera landers, isn't really that difficult. Also, unlike the Mars images, which are far too 'earth-like' (Devon Island I believe) the Venus images are not, they really are 'alien'. And seriously hellish, for that matter.
Where did you get those images by the way - I'm familiar with the classic Venera 13 one (I think it's 13), but the other ones I've never seen before. Do you have links?
Also, from what I know about the Russian psyche, I think they would be ashamed to fake stuff. NASA and Americans, they don't give a shit, but Russians, no. They genuinely care (it's interesting, after all, that music like LoV can exist in a supposedly authoritarian state? Kind of destroys that propaganda, imo).
Anyway - interesting about the origin of their band name - Katrina is telling me they really did call themselves Venera in her world. Given her penchant for shoegaze, and her own record label (PAWS Records) and her Russian husband and children and so on, she is telling me they signed to her label.
Yeah, I know, parallel world stuff just keeps on imposing!
But this LoV set of yours was seriously, seriously beautiful - thank you so much!! Katrina never mentioned them. I'm going to have words with her.