Sun Q: Reimagining Rock Music

Russian rock slowly developed in the 1960-70s in the Soviet underground, and, despite some inspiration from the Beatles, David Bowie, and other Western rock pioneers, as well as Jamaican dub music, it reached its peak and mainstream status in the late 1980-1990s, thus, becoming a largely nationally isolated cultural phenomenon. This isolation was attempted to be broken by Joanna Stingray with her 1986 double album Red Wave: 4 Underground Bands from the Soviet Union, featuring her covers of songs by Soviet bands like Kino, Alisa, Aquarium, and Strannye Igry. However, this album is more well-known in Russia than in the West, and is likely more representative of Russian rock than the Western one. Overall,Russian rock seems to be largely unknown to the global audiences.

Russian rock’s key features, unlike mainstream Western rock, include, impassioned delivery, and the inclusion of violin and wind instruments. Sun Q, a garage-psychedelic band founded in Moscow in 2015, has a rather different approach to rock than the overwhelming majority of Russian rock musicians. It orients itself towards the origins of rock, particularly psychedelic rock, as well as the Western canon of rock music that was built on those origins (e.g., The White Stripes, Florence + The Machine). This orientation is not just pure imitation; Sun Q, while paying homage to the Western greats, experiments with their works and creates its music born out of the Russian mentality and “inspired by the archetypes from the collective unconscious”, as is written on the group’s website. Sun Q is, therefore, probably the first quite successful Russian underground rock band that is inspired, yet not bounded, by the Western rock music legacy and that produces songs in English, aiming at audiences world wide and vastly extending the notion of what Russian rock may sound like.

The music is composed by Ivan Shalimov, who plays the guitar, keyboards, and bass, while the non-musical direction is done by Elena Tiron, the lyricist and vocalist. The motto of Sun Q is “if magical realism was music”, referencing the style of art that preserves a realist worldview, while baking magical elements into it. Sun Q’s song themes and lyrics are indeed a little weird: they often go back to mythology and folklore. Psychedelic music, combined with magical realist lyrics, is probably what caught my attention when I first heard Sun Q; it is, indeed, extremely intriguing and charming.

My favourite song by Sun Q is “Jane Doe”, the opening to their latest album Myth (2023). It very much resonates with me, since it’s about a person’s search for their identity and mapping out of their personality, the process that I personally (and probably many people of my generation) am going through right now. The lyrics of the song tell us about a mysterious woman – Jane Doe – having different feelings throughout the day, with changing dress colors to reflect those different mood states and sides of personality. Another quite similar song that I enjoy from this album is “Elizabeth Siddal”, which was largely inspired by the famous pre-Raphaelite painting Ophelia by John Everett Millais. Elizabeth Siddal was the model for this painting and the song is a psychedelic interpretation of the painting and the dream Ophelia might have had. This song is about trying to understand your dreams, an endeavor that is doomed to fail since they are highly symbolical and seemingly illogical.

John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1851-1852, Tate Britain

Winter is a big topic in the Sun Q’s songs, which is not unexpected given that winter in Moscow is usually snowy and lasts at least 5 months. The song “Winter Lady” from Sun Q’s first album Charms is about a mysterious Winter Lady/mist that creeps through space into the minds of people and influences their thoughts and behaviour. The bluesy song “Severe” is supposed to be a song about the permanently frozen expanses of the Russian North, but I think it might fit in as perfectly somewhere in the vast marshlands of the American South where blues was born. Sun Q’s first single “Christmas” seems to urge us to enjoy the Christmas time by spending it at home with a special someone , but in the end it surprisingly turns out that this special other is a “beloved imaginary ghost”. The message of this song is that it is okay to celebrate Christmas alone by listening to music, drinking champagne, and walking around the city. What unites these 3 songs and why I enjoy them is that, in addition to their mystique, these songs are all incredibly warm inside despite (or maybe even due to) the fact that they are about winter.

Poster for “Children Singing”

The eclectic song “Children Singing” from the Myth album, based on a mystical poem by Joseph Brodsky about the voices of children floating through the forest, is really great at expressing this weird atmosphere of being in a forest during rain and hearing childrens’ voices ring afar. “Children Singing” is, indeed, a brilliant “psychedelic experience for the senses”, according to the reviews of the album. A very musically different song from the same album, “Still Searching for the Skulls” is about two hippies that are in love with each other searching for some feeling that they together used to have, but that they have since forgotten. It is also about the freedom, hope and simplicity one feels when one is young and the longing for them when one gets older. “Jimmy the Pirate” from their Charms album is, however, much less optimistic. It is based on the lyrics of a same-named song by Alexander Vertinsky and is about Jimmy, a boy at a snack bar on a cruise ship who dreams of being a pirate, but is fed up with his current unnoteworthy state of affairs. Many could probably relate to this sentiment of being deeply disappointed when your unrealistic and lofty ideas about the future get shattered. Elena Tiron’s charismatic vocal performance is very persuasive: you could actually imagine her as Jimmy the Pirate.

In their interview with Progressive Rock Central Sun Q explained that their latest album Myth is “all about tapping into a power that exists beyond our five senses, bridging the gap between the subconscious and logic”. This approach to music is made 100% clear in the final song of the album called “Crystall Doors”, which references Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, a book that recounts the author’s psychedelic experience of being under mescaline, giving him plenty of insights ranging from “purely aesthetic” to “sacramental”. In their song, though, Sun Q omits the part about drugs and just ponders on what it might feel like to have one’s worldview significantly expanded through bringing the conscious and the subconscious together. In general, I strongly agree with this idea that there is a lot to be found only by listening not only to one’s mind, but also to one’s soul. “Crystall Doors” is an overwhelming, yet brilliant song that underscores this idea.

What is especially interesting for me as a cinephile is that a few Sun Q songs were transposed into the works of cinematography by CarpeDiemFilm, a creative association led by the director Sergey Kuznetsov. Not only did they make a couple of live recordings at a concert in Moscow (“Human Race”, “Big Fish”, “Jimmy the Pirate”) and a black-and-white recording of the acoustic version of the “After This” song, but Sergey Kuznetsov has also worked on the yet unfinished mockumentary “The Secret History of the Rock” inspired by Sun Q. This mockumentary is supposed to comment on the connection between music, mysticism, and politics, themes that can be found in Sun Q’s lyrics. As part of working on this mockumentary, Sergei Kuznetsov developed music videos of “Still Searching for the Skulls” (as a promo) and of “Space” (as an episode of the movie), which show the perfect mastering of various cinematic techniques (and especially of Soviet montage theory) to be able to naturally transpose the rhythm of the songs onto the texture of the film.

This natural transfer of rhythm from a musical medium into a cinematic medium is one of the things that make Sergey Kuznetsov a very peculiar director. Just look at the screenshots from the scene that is supposed to be a dance of the Bacchae, female followers of the Ancient Greek god of wine Dionysus (this scene is inspired by the Sun Q song “Dionysus”); this dance is very erotic in the sense that one can feel a whole lot of tension and energy in a body in the state of ecstatic frenzy.

Screenshots of the dance of the Bacchae

The music of Sun Q is, in my humble opinion, fundamental since it ponders on the themes that transcend art , media, time, and space. Like Theodor Currentzis and MusicAeterna (about which I wrote my previous article), Sun Q has significantly influenced the way I perceive music. Yet again, I dare you to plunge yourselves into the extremely magnificent world of modern rock music.

P.S.: A very interesting film project on which Sergey Kuznetzov is currently working is “DDT XX CENTURY”, a film that is supposed to tell the story of four generations of a family that lived throughout the 70 years of the USSR accompanied by the music of a Soviet/Russian rock band DDT. I am curious whether Sergey Kuznetsov will manage to convey not only the rhythm of the music, but also the rhythm of history by using cinematographic means in a way that would feel natural. The film is supposed to be released in the summer of 2025.

Sources:

https://sunqband.ru/

https://vk.com/sunqband