Red Wave: 4 Underground Bands from the USSR

Red Wave: 4 Underground Bands from the USSR is a split double album, originally recorded on vinyl, which was the first release of Russian rock music in the west. The album, totaling 15,000 copies, was released on June 27, 1986 by the Australian indie rock label Big Time Records, and features compositions from four Leningrad-based rock bands: Aquarium, Kino, Alisa, and Strange Games (Strannye Igry), which, while being presented as “underground” by the record itself, were all members of the officially-sanctioned Leningrad Rock Club and enjoyed a fair degree of popularity among Soviet rock music fans in Leningrad and Moscow. The effort to release Red Wave was singlehandedly spearheaded by Joanna Stingray (born Joanna Fields), an aspiring American rock singer, who in 1984 (at the very dawn of Gorbachev’s Perestroika) traveled to Leningrad, where she was introduced to the flourishing amateur rock music community. Having formed enduring friendships with some of Russian rock’s most recognizable personalities (Boris Grebenshchikov, Viktor Tsoi, Konstantin Kinchev, Sergei Kuryokhin), Stingray fashioned herself as both a patron and ambassador of Soviet rock music. For nearly a decade she shuttled between the US and the USSR, smuggling musical instruments and recording equipment to the Leningrad rock community, in this way ensuring and sustaining its artistic endeavors. Stingray envisioned the album as a cultural weapon to end the lingering Cold War tensions that existed between the US and the USSR, that would catapult Soviet rock musicians to international fame. The back-cover image of the record contains the Soviet anti-war slogan “Peace to the World” (Miru mir) which was gaining renewed traction among the westward-looking Soviet youth, weary from inhabiting the confines of the Iron Curtain. The release of the album made headlines in international popular music publications, and as a result of this, Gorbachev himself has been quoted to wonder, “Why is it that such albums come out in America, but not here?” This question resulted in an order to the USSR minister of culture to work with amateur popular musicians. Red Wave was also used as a diplomatic tool for US immigration services, when Stingray sent a copy to Ronald Reagan in an effort to bring Leningrad musicians on tour to the United States, as well as iron out the bureaucratic logistics of her impending marriage to Kino guitarist Yuri Kasparyan. Red Wave, therefore, is emblematic of the often contradictory, yet nevertheless culture-shifting sociopolitical mechanisms that emerged as the result of Gorbachev’s reforms, which sought to promote domestic cultural production while engaging in international discourse. Spawned as a clandestine collaborative project on the peripheries of music production in both the US and the USSR, the album managed to tear a small, yet noteworthy hole in the seemingly impenetrable political impasse between the two countries, serving as a harbinger of the monumental changes looming on the horizon.