Red Wave: An American in the Soviet Music Underground - BOOK

by Joanna Stingray AUTHOR and Madison Stingray 

In this fascinating memoir, Joanna Stingray documents her time living and playing music in the U.S.S.R., as well as her experience smuggling that music out of the Soviet Union to release it for Western audiences. At age 23, she arrived in Soviet Russia and quickly met now-legendary musicians Boris Grebenshchikov, Sergei Kuryokhin, and Viktor Tsoi. Enthralled by the underground music scene there, Stingray began producing music with these artists and others by 1985, and undertook the daunting task of getting the music out of the U.S.S.R. in order to put together the album Red Wave: 4 Underground Bands from the USSR. Now, nearly forty years later, Stingray has created this recollection of her time there, complete with photographs, interviews, and artwork from the bands she worked with. A powerful testament to the irrepressible power of music, this memoir celebrates the rebellious youthfulness of the artists in the Soviet underground music scene and reveals the lengths they went to to share that spirit with the rest of the world.