“We still consider ourselves youth” – Newspaper Kommersant No. 183 (7384) of 10/04/2022

St. Petersburg alternative group Jane Air released the first new album in seven years, entitled “Myelofon”. Boris Barabanov asked the leader of the group Anton Lissov about the new disc, as well as the success of the song “Junk” in the West and how it has changed with Little Big.

– Shortly before our conversation, I listened to the new album of The Mars Volta, they returned after a ten-year pause. And this is the music that no one expects from them – peaceful beach yacht rock. Did Jane Air have a desire to come back with something unexpected when you were recording the Myelofon album?

“For us, this is the norm. We either lighten up, or flirt with electronics, we are constantly changing. We don’t want to repeat 2002 when “Junk” came out, and we’re constantly being bombarded by the fans for it. They keep asking when we’re going to record the same guitars as on “Junk”. We can’t bend one line, we want to be like an actor who played in a western today, tomorrow in a melodrama. Other bands create side projects for experimentation, and we tried to cram everything into one band, which was bursting at the seams from this. But “Myelophone” is still the more classic Jane Air sound. A new member of the group Sergey Vyrvich helped us to return from electronics to rock. He just left the Pilot group and was left without a job. So now we finally have a person with an academic musical education in our group.

– You mentioned several genres of cinema, but the album “Myelofon” was created in a single genre?

– No, we are pretty well shaken there. There’s also some electronics, house with a straight kick, but still we take it to rock. We actually had only one album, where we sustained a single concept – “Sex And Violence” (2007).

– You mentioned the song “Junk”, which received worldwide attention this year thanks to its appearance in the TV series “The Boys”. The track topped the chart of the most listened to songs from games, movies and series, which is compiled by the site Tunefind. How did you find out that something is going on with the song now?

– We found out when the song began to appear in people’s stories in the banned Instagram network. We’re like, “Wow!” We’ve had a negative experience with placing our music in movies before. We wrote music for one film there, it now has a rating of 3.7 on Kinopoisk, so I won’t name it. And the song got into the series “Boys” through the Moscow company SoundBroker.pro, which works with Western studios, and we signed all the papers after the series with our music came out. The creators of the series were looking for some kind of trash, because the series itself is trash. For a scene where the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and Moscow houses covered in graffiti are in the frame, “Junk” fits perfectly. We received money for using the song – well, for three Moscow dinners. But on the digital platforms where the song is located, we certainly saw growth. I judge primarily by Spotify. Spotify was just leaving Russia at the time. By the way, I still have a T-shirt with the inscription “Now forever” from the era of the Russian Spotify, I even perform in it sometimes. So, Spotify left Russia, and our listening on this site grew, and it became clear that we were being listened to “out there”. We even made some money streaming because of this song. Some foreign fans translated the text of “Junk” into English, and comments appeared like: “Wow, for Amazon Prime, even harsh, too much!”

Does Jane Air feel like a comeback band? Or did you never leave?

We still consider ourselves youth. Although we can probably apply the sled model to our career, this is when you climb to the top for five years, and then you move down from it all your life. Someone moves out smoothly, and someone turns over on the go. Side projects helped us stay afloat.

– As I understand it, we are talking primarily about Little Big, where you played with your Jane Air colleague Sergey Makarov. It’s a completely different genre, how did you get there at all?

– The genre is different, but the people who were engaged in Little Big were from an alternative party. After all, Ilya Prusikin also has a long history, there is nu metal in the Tenkorr group, and Construktorr, and other projects. First they brought in our bassist Sergey Makarov with his electronics, as they had to prepare for the opening act for Die Antwoord. And then they pulled me up as a carrier of concert energy.

– How did you first draw those black lips that we see in Little Big videos?

– At first I was completely in makeup. It took a very long time to draw this clown coloring book, I remember how I had to do it in extreme conditions, for example, in a dressing room without light in France. In general, the makeup ended up being reduced to these lips.

– After the appearance of the song “Skibidi”, Little Big began to rapidly move into more and more commercial pop and eventually wrote the song for Eurovision “Uno”. How comfortable were you in all this, were there any moments that completely contradicted your nature?

— I liked the contrast between our grotesque clips and live presentation. At concerts, the same “Skibidi” sounded harsh, rave-like. Actually, staging live performances was my area of ​​​​responsibility, and I made sure that the order of the songs produced the right effect, so that you could feel the drive. The same song “Taco”, which has a cute video with dancing pasta and hot dogs, was performed very hard at concerts. At the same time, Sergei and I did not interfere in the creation of songs. And when Little Big went to LA to record, we basically sat on the second floor of the studio and did more Jane Air tracks, some of which ended up on the new album.

– In the end, everything looks like that Little Big finally set sail for other shores, and you and Sergey remembered that you have Jane Air.

– Partly so it was. We had time to blow the dust off the old demos and ended up in the studio for three months. Although, for example, the song “Strike Matches” lay with us mixed for a year and a half, and “XXX Beauty” came out as a single.

– In the title track of the album “Myelofon” you sing: “Let’s get off this planet, the last one turns off the light.” When was it written?

This song is two years old. Its relevance comes in waves. Here is another wave.

Do you feel confident on this planet now?

— We are now going on tour in support of the new album, and we really want to play these concerts. And the stool is shaking under us. So I will say this: all the answers are in our songs, we really want to hug all the audience with them. You know, the St. Petersburg bar industry has a slogan “support locals” – “support the locals”. Perhaps this is what we are going to do now.