For more visual information jump into our “Moving Recollections” section.
For more visual information jump into our “Moving Recollections” section.
1998
We began with the event that was dedicated to a number. This number was — as you already guessed — fifty-six, of course. This event was entitled “Exhibition Nr. 56” and took place between November 2 and 7. It started our history and presented 56 Stuff to the audience for the first time.
We made lots of images of 56, collected some objects related to this number (for example, a 56meter-long toilet paper or a book named “56 Poles of Behavior”). Also, we produced a specifically conceptual soundtrack: unhurried and quite monotonous music of 56 beats per minute tempo, presented under the collective alias DJ 5 & DJ 6. That was really odd! However, visitors enjoyed the happening, and more than that, later we were asked by another venue to show our mad 56-collection again.
By some miracle, we have a rare VHS-footage from one of the exhibition’s days.
1999
After the success of our first event we decided not to organize something else for awhile. Do you think that decision was a little bit illogical? Ha!
Photo by 56 Stuff, Department of Random Photos
2002
To get back in shape we organized a small one-day show at the St. Petersburg Gymnasium Nr. 56. According to the information we have received beforehand, there were over 1500 students, not including high school. Two of 56 Stuff members (Pavel Bor and Yellowhead) visited them with our 56-collection and had a lot of fun.
After that we organized a club-format-huge-lineup music event where some of our label’s artists (Few, Jeune homme, Booka Dehuk, YaD, Yellowhead) were playing live and DJ-sets. Also there was a second stage where a pair of DJs (Garys and Pako) — as we asked them to do this — were mixing techno with fairy tales on vinyl.
2003
One day, while skimming a tear-off calendar, we invented an essentially new holiday. We call it Day of the Day and it was our answer to the abundance of all these days-of-something. Then, we picked a random date and celebrated our new holiday by making a party with live performances by Moscow Grooves Institute, Nuclear Los, YaD and Yellowhead.
At the same year we launched two parties series: “Update Music” and “Different Listening”. “Update Music” festivals were organized in cooperation with experiment.ru and gathered hundreds of LiveJournal users and other electronic music lovers. “Different Listening” events, which lasted till 2006, were accompanied by releasing compilations of the same name (first, second, third).
We used a Color-It-Yourself approach for the first “Different Listening” event series flyers: a colored flyer was giving an entrance discount — so in order to make it valid visitors used pens, pencils or watercolors.
2005
In order to present Yellowhead’s “Semolina Porridge”, we organized a same-named evening gig with “Back to the chilhood” conception. Visitors were eating semolina porridge and candies, drinking milk and jelly, watching slide films, making pseudochildish drawings, and getting totally childicized.
An example of pseudochildish drawing that was made by a sober adult human.
2006
We decided to sum up some results of our activities and made the show called “56 Stuff in Retrospective”. Yelllowhead, the founder and the leader of 56 Stuff, gave a lecture about history of the project as well as authors and participants. He also demonstrated specially produced video art. The event took place two times: first in a big book store and then in a small movie theater.
2008
This is when we started our conceptual events series “Music Take-Away”. The main feature of these events was, as we boldly implied in the title, an option to take our music away. In order to get free copies of our releases in mp3 format visitors only had to do two things: to be in the right place at the right time, and to bring a USB-compatible flash memory drives. A group of our art delegates visited within the “Music Take-Away” a number of cities, including Riga, Moscow, Perm, Izhevsk and others.
2009
We proposed to the audience another strange idea — to dance for the sake of brain. We made a thematic video about human brain (including “Loss of Mind” drama) and showed it on a big screen, put chess sets on tables and gave away a number of CD copies of ABC Galaxy’s “Glambrainwow”.
Photo by Kap6uk
Also in 2009 we organized an event called “Borschtsch Pogrom” (mutated into a series of events some years later) with a three hours long live back-to-back DJ-set of a wide and wild style range by Idiosync & DJ Greenleg.
2010
In the early 2010 we (for the first time!) tried to avoid writing press-releases (which, as we know, no one reads anyway) and, without any sort of a conception, simply threw a night club party. That is how we came up with two events which were not named by a word or even a letter but by a symbol. We entitled them with a question/exclamation mark called “interrobang”, gathered people and just danced all night long.
At the end of the year we realized quite an opposite conception and organized an event in Erarta, a museum of contemporary art. Supporting the release of the “7×8” compilation, Scaly Whale, Denis Davidov and Yellowhead combined their different approaches to music making and performing: they presented a collective improvisational program, which both differed from their solo performances and resembled them all at the same time.
2012
In order to make a music video for the track “Games Get You Carried Away” by Idiosync we organized (Attention! It’s hard to believe) a private karaoke party. Well, karaoke was extremely unusual. It was made for an instrumental tune without lyrics — so visitors were dealing with onomatopoeia and trying to sing something like “boom-boom”, “pam-padam” and “tchoo-cha”.
Especially for our uncommon karaoke party we made these brandless labels for bottles.
Some time later we made an audiovisual event inside a 19th century building situated in the heart of St. Petersburg, near The State Hermitage Museum. In the past there was a private mansion, in 2011 it became a home for creative space called Taiga. So, we picked one of its halls (with moldings, a fireplace and a beautiful river view) and considerably modified it. We draped walls with black fabric, set up a sound system and wide screen, and invited some artists (Scaly Whale, Denis Davidov, Yellowhead, Ivan Voltanov, Edd Kumpel, and Idiosync) to fill up this space with loud music and colorful video art.
Photo by Marina Kai
2013
We decided to try a new approach and switched to organizing mostly tiny stealth events without or almost without listeners and viewers. These happenings were designed as completely and deliberately audience-free. Surprisingly enough, it wasn’t as bad as it sounds.
2016
Our best escapade of the year 2016 was definitely this one: we threw a music party and accompanied it with a text translation. Inspired by the parallel world of sports, this translation grotesquely described music and video art with expressions like “A strong throw-in of dense analogue bass!”, or “What is this? Huge deers and bears on a humongous screen!”, or “Our commentary booth is dancing.” The real-time translation was carried out by Yellowhead and Scaly Whale via a public channel in an instant messenger.