Lazer Kontinent - the project from Murmansk into which structure enter Kirill Junolajnen and Igor Stepovoj. Has started
Lazer Kontinent - the project from Murmansk into which structure enter Kirill Junolajnen and Igor Stepovoj. Has started to function in the beginning in 1990. In a basis of a track - lecture on microgravitation under accompaniment corresponding sound.
"Lazer Kontinent" (LK) existed for longer. Igor Stepovyi and Kirill Junolainen investigated the border area between noise, ambient and new wave. "Our original idea was very simple", says Kirill Junolainen. "We wanted to make music without music instruments. Instead of them we played all imaginable and unimaginable things starting with drills and going as far as broken glass. On principle we did not record anything on a sound storage medium, we were simply interested in l’art pour l’art."
But this idea soon proved too constricting for LK. Junolainen explains: "Bands like 'Throbbing Gristle', 'SPK', 'Psychic TV', 'Coil' or 'Cabaret Voltaire’ had used this concept before us but because we were so cut off and isolated we had heard nothing about it. But this did have one advantage. In the small world of the USSR we were able to maintain our spontaneity. We received recordings of bands like 'Einstürzende Neubauten' in the most roundabout of ways and, for that same reason, generally with an enormous delay.“
In 1991 LK incorporated more standard apparatus such as keyboard, guitar and percussion in their range of instruments. Nobody in the band had a classic musical training. In the course of time the music became increasingly electronic but also less spontaneous. This development was also accelerated by the collapse of the Soviet Union, perhaps the most decisive external change to influence the artistic production of LK.
"Around that time, during the political changes, we had our first lessons in information technology at school", relates Kirill Junolainen. "And although the equipment was like from the Stone Age, with personal computers such as the 'Elektronika' or the 'Vektor', we were enormously impressed by new possibilities it opened up. We later bought a similar PC called 'Lvov' and immersed ourselves enthusiastically in the world of electronics", Junolainen continues, "we got high on the new forms of electronic music such as techno, acid house, ambient house, oldskool hardcore, rave electro. This huge flow of music that we had known nothing about literally swallowed us up. We needed almost a year to filter this unbelievable amount of music and in the process experienced an overwhelming euphoria. Our musical horizons shifted dramatically.“