Encouraging Resistance: An AIGEL Q&A

Aigul Gaisina and Ilya Baramiia perform their unique sound at the This Is Navalny memorial festival in Berlin on June 4, before setting out on their first US tour, including an LA date on June 14

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Aigul Gaisina and music producer Ilya Baramiia

AIGEL — Encouraging Resistance

Imagine a different time and place where a psychedelic Russian trip-hop duo infused with a spicy electric and visually succulent flavor could speak their truth and not have to live in exile.

That is not the story of AIGEL. This is a story of a brilliant poetess and producer founded in 2016 by Tatar singer-songwriter Aigul Gaisina from Kazan (Tatarstan) and music producer Ilya Baramiia from Saint Petersburg, Russia.

Band on the Run

After making an anti-war statement on the heels of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, AIGEL became a band on the run. Currently, Aigul Gaisina is based in Berlin, while Ilya resides in Montenegro.

The multi-lingual duo performs in Russian, Tatar, and English, and their 2017 debut album "1190" takes on such subjects as ‘Putin’s dungeons’ — the lawless Russian prison system. The fact that their music has gone viral — the song "Tatarin" garnered over 122 million views on YouTube and the duo received accolades at the Berlin Music Awards — is an indication of not only their talent but their willingness to tackle important topics.

According to the band’s bio:

The music video for the song "You're Born" was released two days after Putin's presidential terms were 'zeroed out' in 2020. The video depicts an old figure of authority becoming young through a Christian ritual of diving into an ice-hole. The video was considered prophetic and gained huge media attention, earning the Silver Lion at the Cannes Lions festival and winning over 15 awards at festivals worldwide, including the Berlin Music Awards.

In autumn 2023, the band's song "Piyala" written in tatar language reached the top spot on the global Shazam chart, as well as 1st places on the Apple Music and Spotify top-100 charts in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. It also ranked 11th in the Billboard TikTok top-100. The music video for "Piyala" reached 40 million views within 4 months.

Their hit song, "Piyala," has 44 million YouTube views after it exploded in late 2023 due to use in a popular TV show, topped the global Shazam charts, and snagged the #1 spot on Apple Music and Spotify charts across Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Their single "Tatarin" has amassed 120 million YouTube views, while other popular singles, including “Prince on White” and "You're Born," have generated millions of YouTube views as well.

I caught up with AIGEL as they were preparing for the This Is Navalny memorial festival and their first-ever US tour, which brings them to Brooklyn, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles — their LA date is on June 14 at the Echoplex.

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What follows is our Q&A, and a special thank you to my allies in the Russian opposition, who helped with the questions and translations. I am leaving it all raw, because I prefer it that way:

AIGEL — Band on the Run

Q. What does it mean to be touring America after leaving what has become a very oppressed country?

Aigul Gaisina: We've never been to America, but we've always seen it in films. For me, going to America is a bit like being in a movie, becoming a character.  In fact, from outside and from what I know about US it seems to me that despite the fact that USA looks like the synonym of freedom and democracy and Russia looks like the synonym of oppression and autocracy, they have something in common - in particular, a certain social darwinism and tolerance for violence, so when I realized that it was time for me to emigrate, I thought that USA could become my new home, because I imagined this country as Russia in reverse, and in this sense, something potentially familiar - a place that will always keep you in suspense, where everything is not simple, a very big country stitched with an imperial narrative and kinda messianism, which seems to me a disease, but in the case of the United States, we coincide in values, I share the values USA declares and they are important for me. So I’m very excited to see with my own eyes what real US is.

Ilia Baramiia: We’re going to visit America for the first time. Hope to find people and audience could more think about music rather than politics.
 
Q. In an interview with Yuri Dud, you describe your songs as “collective prayers.” For a new listener the lyrics are pretty grim. Is this a description of how Russians live now? 

Aigul Gaisina: In the interview with Dud, we talked specifically about the charity concert tour that we went on immediately after the start of the war - the concerts of that tour were the darkest in my life and the audience who came to them was in the same shock, despair and devastation that we were. In general, our music is very different - like life, there are ironic and simply dance tracks, there are songs with a focus on text as well as songs with a focus on sound. We have a fairly wide range of interests in music and feel as non-genre musicians, so we have songs that are known by many in the post-Soviet space and in Europe, and at the same time  there are lot of songs that are experimental and sound more related to the deep underground.

Ilia Baramiia: Our lyrics are different. Some of it is sharp description of current and existential set up of our native country. It’s  not about grimness, it is about truth. Some of the songs are jokes and humor and laughing.
 
Q. How will you describe your music? It is a music about compassion, or about just mirroring the reality, or you try to help people to move forward after sad life events. 

Ilia Baramiia: Is about - if you’re honest to yourself - a very optimistic way of thinking.
 
Q. The power of a totalitarian state are always technologies of control. But when the shiny truth comes out, then information get a Streisand effect. This was a case with your song, which was used as the soundtrack to the Russian TV series "The Boy’s Word". Can you tell us a little about the current bans on the activities and options to earn money for musicians in Russia and while you live in exile? 

Ilia Baramiia: Attempt to describe technologies of control with Streisand effect is wrong. Sometimes truth is not working at all. Wins an easiest and comfortable way of thinking. There’s a long list of bans - we can’t play concerts, work for soundtracks, dangerous to even visit country. Some can’t sell their books, some gets financial penalties, some get to prison, or get prison sentence etc. Real problem - that all not in the legal field. You can’t defend your rights in court. About this ill penitentiary system was our debut album.

Aigul Gaisina: In addition to what Ilia said I’d noticed that the ban lists are so crazily long now that they don’t work on people who want to listen to these artists. If the lists where shorter they could make some believe about that the musicians deserve it, but as they are so absourdistically long now and contain more and more artists who even don’t understand why they are there, people mostly do not care about them. They cannot go to the concerts of beloved musicians that’s a pity, but they still listen to them and today there is no punishment for listening to banned music (this can change though). There is now a new fun born by repression - going to the concerts of beloved musicians to Tbilisi, Belgrad, Istanbul, and so on. So all the stupid things that are done by government often look stupid not only for opposition and civil activists but even for the supporters of the governmental politics.

Q. Do you plan to come back to Russia when war will be over? 

Aigul Gaisina: When the war will be over - no. The war is a result of total degradation of the government and civil institutes of Russia - wars without sense, repressions, putting the people into prison for their words, corrupted courts, no respect for peoples lives. The country is stolen by psychopaths, criminals and murderers, I have no hope that it will become free during my lifetime.

Ilia Baramiia: No, I don’t. Position about this war some of my neighbours scares me. I’m moving forward, me and my family are happy with place where we’re in.

Q. There are sad events in Aigul’s life (here is a reference to the song "Tatarin") Do you find the roots of this in social processes going on in society? Aigul, do you feel signs of a culture of violence in Russian society? I'm asking this because I know that you have a degree in political science. 

Aigul Gaisina: The years between 2010 and 2018 were very comfortable years for Russian people. People started to live better, to eat better, to have more opportunities for education. The gap in salaries was still extremely big between rich and poor but the middle class began to form. My generation was born and lived in extremely free country, I thought about the Soviet experience of repressions and banning/imprisoning for people’s points of view as a horrible past that can never repeat because we live in contemporary world. The violence that was a lot in the 90s became not so common. I was not scared of walking alone on the streets at night. Once I was in court and heard how the prosecutor joked about the fact that too many people are put in Russia into prison for drugs, 228 is a legendary drug article of the law given to extremely lot of people - anything connected with drugs is especially serious crime in Russia - the same as killing a man, and it gives the police as many bonuses as the disclosure of a murder. So the prosecutor joked that "it’s not our fault that they stopped shooting on the streets!" Meaning that police has to put in prison everyone in a row for drugs in order to fulfill the annual plan for especially serious crimes which were becoming fewer and fewer. So there was the real trend, the better people lived the less violence we had. Protests on Bolotnaya showed the new Russian people who were educated, free in mind, feeling self respect and respect to each others, they were a lot and they really frightened the government. I see our new generation of teens - it is extremely smart, tender and talented. We needed some more time to become closer to what can be called civilised country.

But it looks like the criminal government intuitively behaved the way that could turn the country back, make people poor, frightened, brainwashed again, to make them not able to demand from the government fulfilling its duties and serving civilians interests. After years and years of plundering the country that no one could interfere, those people were not ready to start working and answering to citizens. The questions to government and readiness for new life were becoming more and more obvious, so I feel it like the government decided to make some irreparable awful steps to keep the power and opportunity to continue stealing from people their money and resources (and today even their lives). Since the war began the violence level in society keeps becoming higher and higher - police violence, men who returned from the war with PTSD which is never treated, lots of criminals that where pardoned by the president in exchange for going to war - they are now returning back to society via the war they participated in and in status of heroes, and continue doing crimes with feeling of impunity. That all is a tragedy.
 
Q. In this circumstances of war how important of people to have a voice and take a civic action?

An Existential Need

Ilia Baramiia: I think this is more than constitutional rights — this is existential need.

Aigul Gaisina: It is very important for me, because I believe that the control of civil society over the state is the basis for the normal functioning of the country. Another thing is that our civil society is in its infancy and instead of a control function, it rather performs acts of ritual self-immolation - instead of actively interacting with the state for the good, active citizens end up in prison and become prisoners of conscience, heroes, symbols of the era, showing ordinary people who do not suffer from heroism how they should not behave if they want to live their lives somehow. So yes, it is important, but for those people remaining in Russia it is dangerous and requires a high level of fearlessness and self-sacrifice.

People have families, children, old people, they choose to remain silent for their sake, because in the moment it seems wiser to them and no one can blame them for it.
 
Q. Can you tell us how big an anti-war movement/wave is in Russian music now? 

Ilia Baramiia: We only know about bands who escaped from Putin and live outside Russia. I think it’s about 1/3 bands I know. I think about half bands who can’t leave Russia by some reasons are against war. The rest part - scumbags I don’t want to talk about.

Aigul Gaisina: All the musicians I know personally and interact with are against war - actively or passively. Most of them had to leave the country, some of them are inside Russia and reflect the war more accurately. I was surprised that Russian new wave in rap lives in some parallel reality, they do not reflect it at all and continue singing about money, “bitches” and other bullshit. But these guys are really young. The older ones are far more involved into the context.
 
Q. You performed in Belarus a year after the 2020 civil protests. Did you have the feeling that people who came to your concert were losing hope for democratic changes? 

Aigul Gaisana: Yes, by the way, we were once banned in Belarus, it was in 2018, in contrast to the illegal ban in Russia, based on blackmail of concert venues, in Belarus we officially received a paper on which it was written that our concerts were banned due to “low cultural level." Subsequently, the organizers through the court achieved the lifting of this ban. I always counted how long Lukashenko was in power and how long Putin was in power. Looking at Belarus, I could kinda predict what would happen in our country in the next 4-5 years. It was like the same series that started in Belarus earlier and we have some spoilers looking there. This is roughly what happened - in 2018 we were banned in Belarus and at that time bans on artists became traditional in Belarus; in 22 we were banned in Russia along with many other musicians. but with the war, the pace of repression and paranoia inside Russia has sharply accelerated and the madness that is happening in Belarus is already very close to what is happening here. In connection with the protests in Belarus in 2020, we sang a song in Tatar language on behalf of a mother who scolds her son for becoming a murderer and forces him to go wash his hands because they are in blood. It was about Lukashenko, now it can be sung about both dictators, we even managed to play this song in Belarus at a concert.

Ilia Baramiia: Yes, I had that feeling. And I was scared that it looked like I’m losing it too.
 
Q. You will perform at a concert in memory of Navalny in Berlin on July 4th and then come to Los Angeles. Why was it important for you to support Alexei Navalny, and why do you find it necessary to morally inspire Navalny’s supporters now? 

Aigul Gaisana: For me, as for many, his death is associated with the collapse of all remaining hopes. We were so accustomed to the audacity with which he opposed the current government that we seem to have forgotten that he was just a man. It sincerely seemed to me that death would not take him, that it was impossible. I believe that remembering this terrible, cynical murder that lasted several years is very important for everyone, regardless of how people treated Navalny. A person was killed, this is another crime committed by my country, it is not the first - Nemtsov, Politkovskaya, these brave people remain an indelible shame of my country and they should be remembered. And the crimes committed to them should be punished according to the law. This will be a charity concert to help to the political prisoners - I think that it is important and it is an opportunity for people to gather together and see each other, feel that they are not alone. 

Ilia Baramiia: Anti-Corruption Foundation asked us about charity performance to help political prisoners. That’s what we doing when we’re able to do. This is important support. It was 2 months before Navalny’s death, and this concert became a “memory” one. It’s important to encourage people to resist the crime that leaders of Russia doing now.
 
Q. Do you perform or take an actions at any other Russian or Ukrainian protests? Why? 

Ilia Baramiia: Yes we did. When we’re able to. This is to help people to organise against war and to help directly to people who running from war like ourselves.
 
Q. The name of the band in Russian language visually close to spelling of word 'angel'. What was an additional meaning that you put behind of it? 

Aigul Gaisana: Yes we had problems with naming the band, had no ideas, and once my daughter brought to me my name written with inverted N and without «Ь» in the end, it looked like angel, I wrote to Ilia that here is the name of the band and we thought a bit about using this inverted N, but our designer said that the most disrespectful and tasteless thing is to use two different alphabets in the name - it is wasting the time of the audience on writing it switching between alphabets. So we considered it reasonable and he inverted the letter N back and so we left this name as he wrote it.

Ilia Baramiia: It was one of the ideas at start, but our friends convinced us that this is bad idea.

Q. How many songs do you have in English? 

Ilia Baramiia: Only one so far. English is coming more and more in our everyday lives, so I think one day there will be some more. We’re not setting up which language will be next song. It all comes from Aigul’s sense of moment.

Q. What message do you wanna leave for American audiences?

Ilia Baramiia: I don’t want to leave a messages, I want to share my feelings with music, that’s enough.

Aigul Gaisana: I agree with Ilya, we are bringing our music, this is the most beloved and intimate thing we have, we want to share it with those who are interested and open to it and of course to see the people who know us and to spend time with them, when we play live and I look into the crowd I see the best audience in the world it seems to me that with each of our listener I could make friends.

Q. Who are your heroes?

Ilia Baramiia: My heroes are artists who trying to create something new and expand the boundaries. Scientists who work on fundamental things. And I am recently interested what’s going on with Hadron Collider experiments. That’s my heroes. 

Aigul Gaisana: I always admire people who know how to help people through direct action.  I realized this especially acutely, along with my uselessness as a poet and musician, when the war began.  Doctors, firefighters, rescuers, volunteers…

Q. If you could teach the Russian people what would you say?

Aigul Gaisana: I think it’s presumptuous to try to teach someone something. Who am I for this? I would be happy if all the people in the world kept in mind that the borders on the map are drawn by people, they don’t really exist, the earth is huge and it is our common home, very large and diverse, it is open to be investigated, it deserves respect, and people live everywhere on the earth, and most of them want just to love and be loved, not to hate, not to make enemies and fight, not to hurt each other, not to destroy but to create things, build nests, birth children and live in peace with themselves and everything/everybody around.

Ilia Baramiia: I’d rather not segregate people by countries, passports, nationalities, race etc. And I want to say and stress to all people - learn how to use internet, google, how to do the fact-check. We’re living in information society, digital century - you can’t move forward without it.

For more info on tour dates, check out AIGEL.

Socials:

INSTAGRAM | aigelband https://www.instagram.com/aigelband/

Apple Music: http://surl.li/rrokz

Spotify: http://surl.li/rromh

BANDCAMP | https://aigel.bandcamp.com

mail to | aigel.work@gmail.com

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