December children

The recording of the album began in August 1985, after the end of the summer overhaul at the Tropillo studio .
Boris Grebenshchikov about the album:

Continuation of the idyll . The feeling that we can do everything. Kuryokhin again connects to the process and the recording goes like a song. The matter is completely Tolkien's landscapes of Karelia , where I lived in the summer (Village); sheets of metal and an avant-garde-detuned guitar (Thirst); X-th century Welsh bard Gwyon ap Gwernach (Cad Goddo) - and all-all-all. (Grebenshchikov, B. B. A brief report on 16 years of sound recording. ^{1997. [3]} .)

Indeed, in terms of the amount of musical information, this album was the richest among all the band's earlier albums. Already from the first song “Thirst” there are synthesizer attacks by Kuryokhin, industrial noises (musicians pounded on iron and turned metal sheets in front of the microphone), Grebenshchikov’s playing on a specially detuned guitar with lowered strings and Polyansky’s church choir, the soundtrack of which was found on one of the film’s channels .
Since Alexander Lyapin played only on two tracks of the album, the rest of the guitar moves were played (on Fender , which was sent to him as a gift by David Bowie ) by Grebenshchikov himself (Dreams about something more, Dances on the Edge of Spring), and when Tropillo did not like Grebenshchikov’s solo in the song “I am a Snake,” the musicians sent Andrei Vladimirovich to dumplings for lunch, and in his absence they independently recorded the necessary track.
The talk of the town on the album turned out to be the song " 212-85-06 ", first performed by "Aquarium" at the III Rock Festival and absolutely not accepted then by the public. The studio version includes Lyapin’s guitar riffs, Grebenshchikov’s pseudo-Jamaican vocals, and Tropillo’s ditties, as well as an accelerated voice, Mikhail Chernov’s saxophone, noise phonograms, double and reverse vocals, and a great many masked studio effects.
On the song "Village", the violin of Alexander Kussul , the Irish pipe Dyusha and the cello Gakkel created such a design that Grebenshchikov called "getting to where you need to." He claimed that they managed to achieve such an effect only twice later - on the song “Partisans of the Full Moon” on the album “ Equinox ” and the song “The Great Railway Symphony” from the album “ Snow Lion ”.
Album mixing and noise was recorded in January 1986. The phonograms brought by Grebenshchikov from the Lenfilm with the croaking of frogs and sounds of rural nature gave the album a certain timeless color. The leader of the group believed that at that in the eighties the work of Aquarium ended and all that remained was to complete the postscript - the Equinox.

• BG - vocals , guitars
• Vsevolod Gakkel - cello (4, 6, 11), voice
• Alexander Kussul - violin (3, 4, 6, 11)
• Alexander Titov - bass (1-7, 10)
• Pyotr Troshchenkov - drums (1-7, 10)
• Sergey Kuryokhin - korg (1-3, 5, 9, 10)
• Alexander Lyapin - guitar (4.10)
• Andrey Romanov - Whistle (6.11)
• Mikhail Vasiliev - percussion (1, 6)
• Mikhail Chernov - saxophone (10)
• Yelling and singing along to “She can move” - P. Troshchenkov
• Flutes and Choir on “Dreams of Something More” - Gift of Heaven
• Russian folk poetry on "212-85-06" - voice of A. Tropillo

Music and lyrics in all songs - BG.

1. Thirst (3:50)
2. Dreams of Something More (4:39)
3. Cad Goddo (4:49)
4. She can move (3:01)
5. Dancing on the brink of spring (4:40)
6. Village (4:44)
7. I am the snake (2:45)
8. Untitled (0:40)
9. Underwater song (2:08) - instrumental
10. 212-85-06 (5:36)
11. Children of December (2:24)

Bonus Track

Present on the disc "Anthology - IX. December Children "

11. Goats (4:02)

• The original title of the album is “Life from the point of view of trees”.
• The British group “ The Rolling Stones ” has an album “ December's Children ” (1965), whose name translates as “Children of December” ^[4] .
• There are clips for the songs "Thirst", "Dancing on the brink of spring" and " 212-85-06 ."
• The sounds of the flutes and the choir in the song “Dreams of Something More” were not recorded by the Aquarium — they were on the tape even before the recording (the non-erased film from the Melody was used to record the music of the composer Eugene Doga ).
• “Cad Goddo” in Celtic means “Battle of the trees”. This is part of the famous Book of Taliesin . The verses of this song directly echo Taliesin’s poem: “I was the point of the sword - it really was; I was a raindrop, and I was a star ray, "etc.
• Grebenshchikov’s interpretation of the song “She can move”: She is the feminine principle of the Earth . Scarlet silk is an attribute of the priestesses of the White Goddess , the willow branches are an attribute of her cult. A great construction site and a new initiative came out unexpectedly, and are associated with Chernobyl . The song is about that she’s tired and we all will have a bad time if she “moves herself”. The name itself is a quote from D. Byrne .
• “212-85-06” - phone number from the song of the same name. The song was originally presented by Grebenshchikov to Alexei Vishne ^[5] . There are varying degrees of reliability of the legend about the nature of this telephone number. According to one of them, this is the telephone of those years of Grebenshchikov himself. According to another, it was the number of the so-called “ether” : in the mid-1980s, an error occurred in one of the automatic telephone exchanges in Leningrad , as a result of which all the callers of this number were connected ^[6] . Grebenshchikov himself claims that the number was invented by him completely by accident ^[7] . The song also uses quotes from the films “ The Hound of the Baskervilles ” (“What is it, Barrymore?”) And “The Adjutant of His Excellency ” (“A wick of a dumbhouse - smokes!”; “So you, Miron, killed Pavel?”).
• Erho and Labadai are the names of the authors of the famous Latin language that were incorrectly perceived by Grebenshchikov by ear ^[8] .
• The bonus track “Kozly” was recorded at one of the apartment concerts in the mid-80s. Only Grebenshchikov and Titov participate in the recording. After the performance, Grebenshchikov said: “It was always interesting why this song is so happy ...”
• The cover captures Grebenshchikov, Titov and Gakkel in the winter forest. The photograph was taken in the winter of 1985-1986.
• The songs “Dreams of something more”, “Cad Goddo”, “Children of December” and “Village” were included in the so-called “ White Album ”, released by “ Melody ” in 1987.

• 1994 - the Triarius studio reissued the album in its own design .
• 2002 - the album was reissued on CD as part of the Anthology project. A bonus track has been added in this edition.

• Aquarium "Dreams about something more." Text authors: A. Rybin, A. Kushnir , V. Soloviev-Spassky; Editor: Boris Grebenshchikov - M.: Sofia Publishing House, 2004