“Sansara” is the Yekaterinburg group playing indie rock. “Samsara” is already more than twenty years old, but it’s imperceptible that it is going to rest, on the contrary, it is becoming more and more vivid and unpredictable.
Start
The date of birth of the Sansara group is considered the day of its first concert, which happened in the summer of 1997 in Yekaterinburg. However, the members of the group were familiar long before that - even from kindergarten. When they decided to create a group, none of them had a musical education, but there was a love of music, so they just chose their instruments and started playing. Then the group “Sansara” consisted of Alexander Lebedev (Gagarin), Sergey Korolev, Andrey Prosvirnin and Alexandra Kucherova.
At first, the band members relied heavily on their own musical preferences, so their music turned out to be eclectic. However, even then, “Sansara” had a bright personality: the soloist did not pronounce many letters, but had enormous charisma, in addition to traditional instruments, there was a button accordion in the group, and a fragile girl was sitting at the drums.
After the first concert, they participated in the festival “Beginning”, where the group was awarded the prize for the best male vocals and the prize of audience sympathy. In 1999, the musicians released the single of the same name, which included the first four studio songs of the Sansara group and three more songs recorded live at the concert. After that, in the same year, they released two more mini-albums, On-line and “Better Nothing”. 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 first held in Ramenskoye. The performance of Sansara was so liked by the audience and the organizers of the festival that they began to invite them to perform there annually.
Debut album
In 2001, the first full-fledged album of the Sansara group was released - “Everything is possible”, which they recorded in collaboration with Vladimir Shakhrin. After that, the group in 2002 performed at the Maxidrom festival. The group not only played at various festivals, but also organized its own - “The Three of Us Easier”.
In 2003, “Sansara” released the second album “There is no breathing,” in 2004 the album “St. John’s Wort” was an eclectic work that caused controversy among critics and attracted the attention of a wide audience. 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, not only unusual in sound, but also released in a new format: all the songs were simply posted on the Internet. The reason for this was the awareness of the gradual departure into the past of traditional musical media. 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 scene - in a tram that rode on a May night in Yekaterinburg.
At the end of 2011, the group released the album “Sansara”, in which there are many collaborations with other musicians. In 2012, the album “Needle” was released. The latest album, “Swallow”, was presented on April 1, 2016.
Transformations of Samsara
Over time, the composition of “Sansara” changed, and as a result of the original participants only the soloist and songwriter Alexander Gagarin remained there. According to him, now this is not a group, but a musical community, the style of which can be completely different, from electro-pop to minimalistic post-punk or recitative. The activity of the community is impressive: over the twenty years of its existence, Sansara has released ten studio albums, a huge number of singles and videos and participated in many third-party projects.