2001 Interview found -
At last, the message came through. After all the emails and phone calls, weeks of trying to persuade them, Sputnik Sweethearts want to talk.
I take the train west to their home city of St Petersburg (where so many Russian electronic artists are living) but as I travel I reflect upon this fact that even on the St Petersburg scene, Sputnik Sweethearts remain outsiders, unknown to all but a few lucky people. Perhaps this tells us more about the electro that is commonly listened to in St Petersburg than it does about the Sputniks. As in so many places, techno, hard house and trance rule the city's clubs. Anyone who has heard their music knows that, however electronic they may be, the coldness of machines has no place in Sputnik Sweethearts' creativities. Because theirs is a vision not of precision and steel, but of warmth, of almost old-fashioned longing and romance.
And so at last the train pulls into the station, and I meet Sputnik Sweethearts for the first time - appropriately, perhaps, under the clock tower at the entrance to St Petersburg's Moscow terminal.
A little surprise: the Sputniks are brothers, Sergei and Dennis. Not so much of a surprise is that they are warm, friendly and gentle people. Instead of a bar they take me to a coffee house somewhere near Nevsky Prospekt, where, with a table full of cakes and biscuits and strong coffees in front of us, I commence the interview by asking them how they became interested in electronic music. Sergei: "When we were kids, our father worked for a TV station and he was something like a sound engineer. Sometimes he brought home little instruments from the TV studio, little Casio and Yamaha keyboards which they used to make the music for programmes. We thought they were amazing things! We loved to play with them. Then our father took these little toys apart and modified them, so that we could make more interesting sounds - even more fantastic! When we decided to make Sputnik Sweethearts music, for us it was a natural thing to play again with those sounds and try to make something beautiful with them.
Listening to him speak, it is obvious that Sergei has real passion and love for making music and sounds, something which you can hear now in the tracks on the Sputniks' wonderful debut mp3-EP, A Kiss May Cloud My Memory. Few artists indeed express such emotions as care and tenderness through their music in a comparable way. The muscularity, the aggression of much techno is not part of the Sputnik Sweethearts' world, for instead they have a fragile yet elegant lo-fi vision.
Dennis goes on to describe how they make their ideal come true: "We use very simple old electronic toys and instruments, which we sample and change with the filters. It was important to us to try to make something interesting which nobody else makes, so we decided to use only those instruments and nothing else to do the melodies and percussion. It was like a rule for us, so that we can try to do as much as possible with just those sounds." Sergei: "For us, we think it is possible to make music that is beautiful because it is not so exact, and not just concentrate on the bass and kick drum all the time."
Part of the charm of the Sputnik sound is indeed that it half-feels almost as if it will fall apart at any time - The Most Beautiful Girl In The World And Beyond, for instance, with its soaring, echoing melodies combined with a sort of glorious uncertainty. Despite Sergei and Dennis' self-imposed limits, in comparison with Sputnik Sweethearts it is techno and, especially, trance that seem one dimensional - the rises and falls of the sound of dance so inevitable and so lacking in any sense of doubt.
With this in mind, I ask them how they feel about current dance music and its popularity. Dennis: "We like it and we listen to it, but not all the time... maybe sometimes dance music sounds the same for us, and we feel there is more that you can do with electronics than just one thing. We want to create something fresh, which nobody else is thinking about at the moment, even though we don’t have much money to spend on equipment." The blips, pings and rubber bass of The Pulse Of The Sputnik are a nod towards techno, I suggest - especially on the longer version. Dennis agrees: "Yes, it is also part of the sound of the group to have this kind of rhythm and texture as well, it's a different idea for us, and the instruments make it sound less hard than techno." Sergei: "...and sometimes it's just more fun to have bass!"
The track that is almost becoming the Sputniks' theme song is St Petersburg, full of characteristic arpeggios weaving together with broken radios and Casio melodies. It seems unusual to name a song after your own home city, though. "That's true," responds Sergei, "but even though many young people disagree, we think our city is beautiful and has a great history. So for us it is natural to try to express something about this. Also we know that if people are abroad, foreign names sound very exciting and romantic sometimes, even if it is normal for us. It's nice, that idea of a different relationship with the same place."
Sweethearts Forever! then offers a further change of tempo, a perfectly-titled electropop adrenalin rush with home-made drum beats coming to the fore, as the filtered melody line swoops and breaks up over fizzing, droning electronics. So, with track titles like that, the EP and even the band itself, you might imagine that romance plays an important part in the scheme of things for the Sputniks. When I mention this to the brothers, even the apparently more serious Dennis smiles broadly. "Yes," says Sergei,"but this is just what comes out of us, it is not something that we planned so much. It's the best thing to make music about - love... it's just fantastic..." So is The Moon And Stars Are Ours written for someone in particular? At this, Dennis smiles again and I know the answer to my question without the need for anyone to speak.
(Translation of an article by Grigori Vlatch from the Moscow-based magazine Synth. Translation Simon Flourain, copyright 2001.)
oh well!