It was the early nineties. I wrote songs in my last year of school at Oryol and while I was studying at the Oryol Institute of Culture. I got together a group of friends and we called ourselves "Music By The Feel". You couldn't really call it a band. We mainly played in people's homes, artist studios and student halls of residence, rather than on stage. We played on one or two guitars, sometimes accompanied by a rice filled jar of instant coffee or an old, out of tune piano, that kind of thing. i.e. it was more about "feeling" than about "music". But that didn't really bother me at the time since

• I DIDN'T SEE THESE SONGS AS WORKS OF MUSIC, BUT AS POETRY.

Sometimes I even sang songs without the guitar – a sort of Russian epic poems / ballads in many couplets. The recordings of these performances also speak to the era – made using not the best tape and on reel-to-reel or tape recorders. We used what we found at the Melodia shop next to the bus station. Many of these poem-songs seem naive now, but they remain very dear to me.

• I COULD HAVE RERECORDED THEM AND PLAY THEM WELL, BUT I'D RATHER THEY STAY AS THEY ARE, A DOCUMENT OF TIME:

with their youthful air, sometimes out of tune instruments, bedroom sound and so on. Playing with me on instruments and rattlers were Sergei Kholmanskikh, Aleexei Zanochkin, Alexei Tsytsin, Andrei Tereshkov, Sergei Matveev, Alexander Stolyarov, Olga Tishchenko, Vladimir Rusin, Roman Pankov, Maxim Sharypin, Dmitry Gorshkov, Nadezhda Podoleshchenko, among other.

P.S. Only several times, sometime later, I recorded few new songs. So these songs come first, followed by the early ones.