Group "Sansara": history and creativity

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

“Samsara” is an indie rock band from Yekaterinburg. “Samsara” is already more than twenty years old, but it is imperceptible that it is going to rest, on the contrary, it is becoming more and more bright and unpredictable.

Start

The date of birth of the Sansara group is the day of its first concert, which took place in the summer of 1997 in Yekaterinburg. However, the band members had known each other long before that - since kindergarten. When they decided to form a band, none of them had any musical education, but they had a love for music, so they just chose their instruments and started playing. Then the Sansara group consisted of Alexander Lebedev (Gagarin), Sergei Korolev, Andrei Prosvirnin and Alexandra Kucherova.

At first, the band members relied heavily on their own musical tastes, so their music turned out to be eclectic. However, even then “Samsara” had a bright personality: the soloist did not pronounce many letters, but had great charisma, in addition to traditional instruments, there was an accordion in the group, and a fragile girl was sitting behind the drums.

After the first concertfollowed by participation in the festival "Beginning", where the group was awarded the prize for the best male vocal and the prize of audience sympathy. In 1999, the musicians released a single of the same name, which included the first four studio songs of the Sansara group and three more songs recorded live at a concert. After that, in the same year, they released two more mini-albums, On-line and “It doesn't get better”. The group is noticed by Vladimir Shakhrin and offers them cooperation.

The following year, 2000, the band's first real solo concert was held at the Variety Theater, after which they successfully performed at the Invasion festival, which was held for the first time in Ramenskoye. The performance of “Samsara” was so liked by the audience and the organizers of the festival that they were invited to perform there every year.

Debut album

In 2001, the first full-fledged album of the Sansara group, Everything is Possible, was released, which they recorded in collaboration with Vladimir Shakhrin. After that, the group performed at the Maksidrome festival in 2002. The group not only played at various festivals, but also organized their own - “Threesome is easier”.

In 2003 “Samsara” released the second album “No Breathing”, in 2004 the album “St. This is followed by the album “Icebergs and Rainbows”, played in the studio, but according to the laws of a live concert.

New technologies

In 2008, the Sansara group released the album Fires, which was not only unusual in sound, but also released in a new format: all the songs were justposted on the Internet. The reason for this was the realization of the gradual disappearance of traditional musical media into the past. The group considered the experiment successful: as a result, the album was downloaded more than 20,000 times.

With the next album, released in 2009 - "69" - the group did the same. But this time, the presentation of the album became experimental and took place on an unusual stage - in a tram that rides around Yekaterinburg on a May night.

At the end of 2011, the band released the album "Samsara", which contains many collaborations with other musicians. In 2012, the album "Needle" was released. The latest album to date, “Swallow”, was released on April 1, 2016.

Transformations of “Samsara”

Over time, the composition of “Samsara” changed, and as a result, only the soloist and songwriter Alexander Gagarin remained from the original participants. According to him, now it is no longer a group, but a musical community, the style of which can be completely different, from electropop to minimalist post-punk or recitative. The activity of the community is impressive: in the twenty years of its existence, Sansar has released ten studio albums, a huge number of singles and videos, and has participated in many side projects.