«Troll in space» — The Moscow News

▒Space Flight 2012`

Dec. 13, 8 pm, Moscow Planetarium, 5 Sadovaya-Kudrinskaya Ul., bldg. 1, m. Barrikadnaya.

Mumiy Troll front man Ilya Lagutenko and the band Aeronautica are on a new mission: in their project “Space Flight 2012■ they blend music, film and outer space exploration.

Recently, he published a book on the city of Vladivostok, where he spend his childhood and adolescence, and now he is involved in a project that crosses music with cinema.

The idea of creating soundtracks for silent movies isn`t new, but giving a new life to an obscure movie by adding music to it is always an exciting task for an artist. Made in 1935 by director Vasily Zhuravlev, “Kosmichesky Reis■ (“Space Flight■) is one of the first Soviet sci-fi movies devoted to outer space exploration.

And although the film was made a quarter of a century before Yury Gagarin became the first human to travel into outer space, it is believed to be quite accurate in its scientific predictions. One of the reasons is that Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a pioneer of astronautic theory, co-wrote the script and was a consultant for the film`s director. Unfortunately, he died before the movie was released.

Lagutenko approached the project seriously, and work on the soundtrack took more than two years as the musicians tried, according to a statement on the project`s web site, to combine “cinematic and musical ideas related to space travel, developed 70 years apart, but presenting a single whole.■

The musicians hope that the project, whose genre is loosely described as “Russian space electro rock,■ will bring about a new trend in domestic music, attracting more artists to work in that direction.

Time will show whether that will be the case, but for now audiences can check out Lagutenko`s take on the space exploration theme, which he didn`t dabble in before.

Meanwhile, no information on Aeronautica`s further touring plans is available at the moment, so the performance at the Planetarium could be a rare opportunity to see the project live.

Vladimir Kozlov