We tell you about the favourite places for walking by Masha Pyankova - one of the creators of the Garage Healthy Bar, keyboardist of the Gnoomes band. Together with her husband, she runs Zooned, the ambient label, the ECHO promo group, and hosts a podcast about music of the same name.

In short, Masha is wonderful! She creates SOUPer things in Perm.

We suggest getting acquainted with Masha, finding out her favourite places for walking, and take a walk through these places.

Masha Pyankova’s favourite places

Sovetskaya street and the park near the Opera and Ballet Theater
I pass by here every day when I go to work. I have a favourite tree on which the leaves move very psychedelically in the wind. There is always a danger of stopping by Smoky Dog after work.

The Kama River Embankment
Surprisingly, after the renovation, I really like it. For some reason, it reminds me of the Arganzuela Park in Madrid. Also there are trains running overhead, and the Kamsky Bridge seems incredibly large.

Gorky Park
I have always loved amusement parks, the sound of rollercoaster rails and colourful lights. Once, female voice sounded, which requested everyone to leave the park, like the intercom from the computer game "Portal".

Motovilikha
It has a time-lost vibe of cosy Soviet courtyards. I recommend to walk here especially in summer, best of all at sunset.
The old tram bridge in Razgulay, the road from there to the planetarium.
Absolutely infernal place. On the road from the bridge there are garages, next to which men play cards in the evening. There is an absolutely amazing panoramic platform near the planetarium.

Verkhnyaya Kurya and Kuryinsky forest
We go there to smell the moss in autumn and shake the snow-covered trees in winter. Here we discuss the most important life plans.

Dmitry became interested in Soviet signage, as he worked a lot with photo archives, was engaged in font design and was just interested in Perm.
He thought that it would be cool to keep these signages at least in digital form and began to redraw them in his spare time.

"It was just a good graphic era in the 60s and 70s: both architecturally and visually, the city looked more holistic, unlike what is happening in the city now. Therefore, I wanted to preserve that visual era at least in a digital form".

For how long has the material been collected?
In a couple of evenings, Dmitriy collected the main pool of photos, and then for six months someone has given something else, or Dmitriy himself has found new photos of signage. Now these works can be downloaded from the website (http://dmitriikuchev.ru/permoldsign / ) and used for your own purposes - they can be printed on a T-shirt or postcard, used in an architectural layout.

Perm is...
people. Perm is Perm citizens. People define the city.

Where are you from?
I was born in the village Gurina, Kudymkarskiy district. Komi-Permyak Autonomous Okrug (at that time).

What is music for you?
Music is something natural or something that cannot be described in words.

Why "KIKOK"?
"KI" - hand, "KOK" - leg in Komi-Permian.

How did you get signed to the Amsterdam label?
I sent out my first EP to various labels, there were over a hundred of them (haha, only 20 percent of them were probably potential).
At one moment, the manager of Magnetron Music wrote to me, and in the first letter he apologized for the delay in responding. I reread this letter several times and couldn't believe it, haha.

How do you come up with track names?
On the first two albums I used only Komi-Permian names. This time I decided to simplify everything. It's always an exciting process. It's like the icing on the cake. It seems to relate to the cake and seems to be separate, but it is often the first thing that catches the eye.

What was the most unusual thing you used to record the track?
For me personally, it's probably recording the melody of a helicopter toy, and then creating a whole track based on it. For many musicians, such methods are quite a common instrument. There is even a term - field recording.

What is the name of the new album? And what is it about?
SPEEDWAY is the name of the new album. It's about our very life, no matter how fast you drive, you always go in a circle. If you arrived first, it just would mean that you did it faster than others.
Perhaps the one who arrived last would get more pleasure of riding.

Producer, lecturer, showrunner, composer, the "Talking Head" of the Perm Opera Ballet Theatre on YouTube, co -author of theatre projects, creator of the promenade performance "Location".

How did the idea of the Location play come about?
Many ways have led to it. Firstly, I've always liked the headphone format. A portable audio system that is only yours , I think, is a victory; it has changed the sound market and sound aesthetics very much and in a very good way.

Secondly, I came to Perm in 2017 especifically to work on audio performances with headphones. It was a performance of Remote X by the German band Rimini Protokoll. Simultaneously, Memorial, Perm City Centre and New Collection wanted to make a documentary audio performance about reprisals. We made it in a year. It's called the "Voice Zone. Perm, 1937". Actually, this was the next step.

I also did one advertising project - a meditative journey through the Lakewood complex. This is in Biomed, the outskirts of Perm, a complex of apartments and houses has been built there, which looks like a Swiss mental hospital.

And it's not clear who might be interested in this in Perm, they just were looking for different wild ways to present it, and so we made a meditative audio performance for them. People came, all sorts of cool things were waiting for them: they had a barbecue, they had a sunset scene. There was a narrator, generally, everything
it was very cute and funny.

Well, I made one project with headphones, two projects with headphones, and Remote has already toured two seasons, and I thought: "All right, that's it, we need to do a performance in the city, study urban identity." And in 2018 we came up with Location, and in 2019 we released it. It was the first season, and it wasn't so focused on audio documentaries yet, there was a patchwork of a bunch of different stories and voices, composed texts and all . It was chipper, but wild.

By September 2020, we have made a new Location, which removes the quantity, but leaves the quality of widely and in detail told documentary stories.

How do you see the theatre in Perm now? What are its prospects?
I moved to Perm deliberately, also because Perm is a very cool spectator. Institutions, in my opinion, are not so important to evaluate. In Perm, in principle, there are very high-class intellectuals, no matter how much it has been destroyed in
different years, it still remains. Moreover, technical intellectuals, who are drawn to the emotional. In Perm, there is a very cool viewer with whom you can and should work in a cool way, you don't need to explain some things to him, he is not completely traditional and classic, he is progressive. People themselves are looking for something modern - this is a high indicator. On this basis, different theater is being made. Theatres are all different, and this is good - they work with different audiences, in different aesthetics.

I wouldn't say that I have some ideal theatre of the future in my head. I think that theatre is moving in the same direction that we are moving in Location - towards less specialty and a less composing of narratives.

It seems to me that theatre is moving towards greater empathy, horizontal communication between a person and a person, not between an abstract stage and an abstract hall.
I reckon that Perm is one of the greatest provincial cities in such a movement.

I am a big patriot of Perm, I promote Perm and provinciality in general to everyone and I struggle with this prejudice: " Such cool projects? In Perm?". And where should they be? "Well, in Moscow, in St. Petersburg, they could be made, there are more opportunities." No. Not more, less. Because my peaceful emotional state is the key to my capabilities. And to fight, to compete with thousands of people… Well, in the end, all of them just work as baristas. They go with big creative projects and work as baristas. And this is their choice. Such a ratio of ambitions, tasks and reality is just a little bit upsetting.

Projects in Perm that you respect?

• Nemhat
• Gnoomes
• Gnomes Fest
• Opera and Ballet Theatre
• Stage Molot
• Flahertiana
• FUTURE.DOC
• Private Philharmonic "Triumph"
• Almost the entire staff of the Perm Museum of Local Lore, who deals with Khokhlovka and the Museum of Antiquity
• PERMM

Designer
ceramics guru
creator of crazy things

Why Chelovek-Khrustal*?
Actually, at the age of 15, my eye was replaced with an artificial lens, and if you look at it from a certain angle, it shivers and glitters. Reflects light like a mirror.
* Khrustal is Russian for crystal and artificial lens, chelovek - human

What do you do? In short, describe your projects
Oh, it's hard to explain, I just do the things that I fetishize at the moment. So, I go to second hand shops, looking for interesting things and take them as the basis of future clothes, cut them off, sew them on - I do plastic surgery on clothes. I also crumple clay, and it turns out to be ceramics!

What is cloth mutation for you?
My little girl who lives inside me. She asks me to do it. It's all for her.
It's about inner experience. It's easier for me to be in reality when I pour them out into material objects. A kind of therapy.

How does it come to your mind to do such crazy things?
I usually spend several months collecting the treasures of second-hand shops, flea markets in one subject, then I dump it all on the floor and start combining it. I get inspired in the same place - in second-hand shops and flea markets.

How did you come to cloth mutation?
I don't remember, honestly, how it happened, but initially I resold vintage clothes, at some point it seemed beyond boring to me.. And I was like, "Why not to start remaking them?"..
At that moment, I did 10 things a week, just was nuts about it. And the idea came that clothes mutate into new forms and meanings.

Why not new fabrics? What 's the fun of upcycling* ?
At first, I just liked the materials from second hand shops, because they are more interesting, better quality, it's not a pity to accidentally spoil them. There was more space for experimentation. I'm not a fan of new fabrics at all, even if I take a piece of fabric, then only some kind of USSR calico. Or lace, tulle, etc. They are are imbued with time, it's so fascinating.
And if we talk about the reuse of things, at the very beginning I did it unconsciously, it just seemed cool to me that things could have a second life (not just clothes).
I still like things with a story so badly.. You can imagine who wore this, and then you find out that this thing was worn in one school in a certain class; in short, it makes me squeal. It would be cool to write a person's name, and what he did when he gives his thing away for reuse.

*Upcycling is one of the methods of dealing with old things, thanks to which they gain a second life, by finding an utilitarian and creative usage.