by Ivars Drulle
The Ilet’-110 Stereo was a 24-kilogram reel-to-reel tape recorder with three motors – one for each of the two reels and one for rewinding – and three glass-ferrite tape heads for recording and replaying. The tape recorder had an inbuilt speaker with illuminated needles jumping around to show the audio signals, and the player cost close to 1,000 rubles – close to six month’s wages for an ordinary worker. For big Radiotehnika S-90F speakers (the newest model), you needed to part with a month’s pay, but you could connect a whole two pairs of them to the tape player, and as the ‘90s began, all this equipment was at my disposal. And certainly not because my family were wealthy Party officials, but because for a very short while at the start of the ‘90s, a unique situation arose with prices: with the start of hyperinflation, the ruble became worthless. Some workers’ salaries rose by three or even ten times, but due to the fact that in shops every item had a fixed and unchanging price, products suddenly cost absolutely nothing. It was at just this magical moment that my sweating papa successfully hunted down this equipment in a small shop and threw down a stack of rubles, and into our possession came electronic devices which, over the years to come, would give no rest to the Russian neighbours of our Jugla khrushchyovka.1
Up until then, I had struggled to record the late-night radio show “Let’s Get to Know Each Other” (Būsim pazīstami) using our old cassette player. Once a month, Latvian Radio gave the opportunity to record a selection of the latest hits from the West. After 45 minutes of chart music, the programme’s creator Arvīds Mūrnieks would announce a break, so that we could all turn the cassette over to the other side, but I could never catch quite the right moment – my tape was always either too short or too long and so the break would end up being in a stupid place. And, anyway, most often I had already dropped off by then and was awakened by a sound: the tape had spooled itself out, and its end, spinning pointlessly, was tapping against the edge of the shelf.
With this new, silvery aluminium beast a new life started for me in the world of sound, and this precisely coincided with some strange changes at Latvian Radio. The youth programme Spark (Dzirkstele) would sometimes play good songs, but most of the show was taken up with opinionating on youth problems, reading out listeners’ letters, and overviews of the doings of well-known people. Quite often I would sit down, holding a finger to the запись2 button, and when a song started I would record it right from the very first sounds. If the beginning sounded rubbish, I would wind the tape back and wait for the next one. Within a short time, I had built up a pretty good collection of hits; it was just a pity that they almost never mentioned who the performers were – I’m even now continuing to find out their names.
It was on Wednesdays, I remember precisely – early evenings on Wednesdays around 6 – when on came a show put together by the editorial office for children’s programmes, announced by the jingle “The programme for kiddies – yehehe – Zvaigznīšu brīdis (Little Stars’ Moment)”. There was usually an actor on it who had a clothes-peg on his nose, and he pretended to be Karlsson.3 I was long past childhood, and Karlsson’s mutterings no longer appealed to me at all, but just as the structures of the old empire were starting to collapse, the studios of Latvian Radio had started to host all kinds of parasites and wreckers, who were left fairly undisturbed. Everyday I diligently held my finger to the “record” button, waiting for some super song to begin, my ears wide open, and I couldn’t help but hear that from a programme for kiddies it had quite quickly been transformed into anarchy-inspired destruction of the studio equipment. Everything was falling apart: workplaces all around, my extracurricular meetings at the Pioneers’ Palace; the last time I was there, we smashed up the furniture, ripped out the curtains, threw piles of photographs out of the window, gathered up things that might come in useful and left, never to return.
I’m certain that the creators of Zvaigznīšu brīdis were doing something similar in their studio, only they were recording it with good microphones and broadcasting it over the airwaves. What they were recording was the feeling of our times – that no one had any expectations of the future and no one knew what the next day would bring. And maybe none of us would still be here at all – maybe we would be wiped out or incinerated in a nuclear war, maybe the USSR would come back and we would have to spend the rest of our lives in exile in Siberia. What kind of career, what kind of purposeful future could there be? Your money was worthless, there was no petrol in the tank and nor would there be any, while in cities in the region shells were being fired and war had sparked.
This could all easily be heard on Zvaigznīšu brīdis – instead of stories for children, there were generous helpings of young men yelling hysterically and incoherently. This shouting alternated with nonsensical babbling and rambling; sometimes there would be a nasal voice saying something in Finnish, then Lithuanian, before being abruptly interrupted by a song that was criminally badly recorded and sung oddly.
A typical ZB show went more or less like this: absurd scenarios were acted out in various places and situations. We heard them on the programme not in a logical order, with each section having a beginning and end, but simply as they came to the post-production editor. Incidentally, here can be seen a great similarity to how millions of people spend their evenings these days, with TV remote in hand pressing buttons, for a minute or a few seconds seeing an old film about the torments of love, then a monster truck rally, then a programme about liver health, then a political debate, then an animated kids’ film, and then everything from the start again. And what kind of kids’ show could it be anyway, if on it you could hear, for example, this English-language clip, pulled from who knows where: “You gotta check out these Latvian babes! Listen, all you horny guys out there, I just came back from a couple of fun-filled weeks in Riga. Those Latvian babes are something else.” The children of Latvia, myself included, listened in astonishment every Wednesday, glued to their speakers.
On what other themed programme could you hear this counsel for children: “The Japanese are short people, and all of them are alike…” There was no chance to consider this further, as an instant later, interrupted mid-sentence, there would be Roberts Gobziņš performing his legendary track “The Little Boy and the Moose”, or the explosive dance hit “Come closer, my waterlily, shit steams, shit steams, shit steams, steams – shit steams, shit steams, steams”.
I mentioned the three-headed reel-to-reel tape player at the start because pretty quickly the carefully curated selections of normal tracks were recorded over with Zvaigznīšu brīdis – bit by bit at first, until eventually all of Arvīds Mūrnieks’ sacred and untouchable overviews of the month’s best songs from “Let’s Get to Know Each Other” had been deleted.
At that time charity shops hadn’t yet appeared in Latvia. I wore my father’s wedding shoes, twenty-odd-year-old wool jumpers with patched elbows, and the trousers I had worn for my Year 9 graduation party, which had since become too short. Incidentally, long, hanging trenchcoats – the kind worn by flashers – were then in fashion. Everyone dressed ludicrously because you couldn’t buy anything, and those who made their own clothes at home tended to mess up things that looked beautiful in videos. I was one of those fashion victims: in order to get stonewashed jeans, I put some blue trousers in a bowl and slathered them with disinfectant chlorine. The bleach not only ate away at the blue colour but also turned the fabric piss-yellow in some places. That wasn’t even all – the jeans weren’t evenly bleached; in the thigh area they had a couple of huge, white stains against a blue background, and another yellowish one with white trailing tails on the bottom. Imagine my relief and joy after several full days in these jeans, along with my father’s wedding shoes and a jeans jacket made from my mum’s dresses, when I saw a guest appearance on television by Zvaigznīšu brīdis. These clowns were dressed just the same as me, but even more terribly, and they babbled and moved about awkwardly too!
So dressed, we made regular daytime visits to the Central Market, where you could get spirits. In the evenings, we would dilute it with water and knock it back until we vomited. But after throwing up, we’d keep on doing just the same. When we left home in the morning, we really didn’t know where the night would find us, and that was just as well, otherwise we wouldn’t have gone out at all. Cassette recordings of The Doors played in the background at basement parties, and we hoped to die young and beautiful, just like Jim. I listened to ZB only at home, because you couldn’t drag the 24-kilogram tape recorder along, and I didn’t have the money for a cassette player to transfer the songs from the reel onto. The brief moment when you could buy anything for a laughable sum had ended like a soap bubble popping.
The director Ieva Ozoliņa has made a documentary film with the title My Father the Banker about her father’s meteoric rise and fall. Founding a bank and attracting deposits, her father flared brightly at just the same time as ZB – the very start of the ‘90s – and from an ordinary Soviet engineer he in just a few years become such an important guy that he held a regal wedding to his secretary at Rundāle Palace, attended by bodyguards. I was Ieva’s classmate at Riga Applied Art Secondary School, and during the brief moment when that banker was burning brightly, absurd realities and an unending carnival atmosphere were our oxygen.
I don’t know where this trend came from, but starting with Hardijs Lediņš’s “Walk to Bolderāja” and continuing with the idiotic Zvaigznīšu brīdis-produced film Journey to Tukums, aimless and spontaneous trips were all the rage. And so one day in the middle of the week after our Latvian language lessons we decided to go on an adventure of our own. Ieva’s father’s luminously burning bank had given her a new white Japanese jeep. Our dear coursemate Zigmunds, to whom she was newly married, received his driving licence with suspicious swiftness, and all the prerequisites for a trip were ideal. We chose as our destination my country house in the forests of Vidzeme, and so on a beautiful afternoon in September 1993 we went off on an adventure. Strangely enough, the jeep already had petrol in it, but with money things were a bit tougher – we had some loose change for spirits and Mehukatti4, but nothing much was left for food. But how on earth could you worry about not having enough food at the start of autumn, when the forests of Latvia were full of mushrooms? In my country house, we found some colourful paper hats and ribbons for children’s New Year celebrations. They would protect us from ticks. Then Ieva remembered that she had along with her a several-month-old infant without a pram or cradle – the baby fitted very well into the big woven mushroom basket and didn’t put up too many objections. But the forest – oh yes – was full of mushrooms, and all of them were so beautiful! The most colourful ones were poisonous, and it was with those that we filled our basket up with fastest. When they were full, the fly agarics and toadstools filled up the basket with the infant too. But he was interested only in his mother’s boobs and he left the mushrooms alone. I think his hands were tied too.
I only saw it out of the corner of my eye, but I’ll remember it all my living days – on a side path in the forest, once the Mustang the colour of Midsummer’s Eve had ejected its imbecilically yelling pack to gather toadstools, I saw a neighbour who lived not far from me in the countryside. She had been gathering penny bun mushrooms and had hidden behind a tree to watch what was happening. I froze for a moment, but with my flasher’s trenchcoat and Santa Claus beard, she definitely wouldn’t have recognised me. And I have no worries at all – I still think that she wouldn’t have believed her eyes, and never would have been able to explain what was going on. Just like I couldn’t even try to explain why in Journey to Tukums, in one shot with the car on the highway there suddenly appeared an ice hockey player in full kit, and why the car stopped by a yelling king, short of stature and with a paper crown in his hand, who presented his daughters to the trip participants and died twice. By the way, these kinds of things looked more believable than the TV footage from Moscow, where around this time tanks were firing shells at the parliament, creating beautiful black holes in the White House.
Normal capitalism had bit by bit begun to clip the wings of the anarchy but the swan’s last song was still to come. The rock opera Rolstein on the Beach was the culmination and farewell to this pleasure-filled pointlessness, this fountain of creative power, which spurted simply for the joy of it. The rock opera was staged at Dailes Theatre in 1997, with the whole flower of Zvaigznīšu brīdis participating, complemented by Suiti women5 and Latvia’s number one punk, the opera singer Uldis Leiškalns. The plot of the opera could have been anything, but in this instance it was the dream of bin lorry driver Bankovskis, which was acted out across 12 or so scenes. The rock opera was shown performed only twice. From what I now remember, on 1st October I took a central seat and eagerly drank in every sound, every gesture. The unfeasibly sexy Aurēlija Anužīte sang about a fake mineral water that was delivered to Livonians, Gobziņš wanted to find out the meaning of life, while Laimis Rācenājs peeled potatoes. It was a farewell fireworks display of baroque resplendence. The guys were already working at commercial radio stations, regularly entertaining the workers in the morning, and the sieve of normality had started to come down over us.
As that year was closing, on New Year’s Eve my friend Artiņš put a bullet in his forehead and became the only one of us to fulfil the dream: to die young and beautiful. I no longer listened to the reel-to-reel tape recorder; it had been replaced by ready-made, freeze-dried music from a clinical CD player, without any option to write criss-cross over the tape, and the ZB tapes deteriorated uncopied. Six months later, I went off to study in the US, and the ‘90s were over.
1. Soviet prefabricated housing blocks, constructed quickly and at huge scale in the 1960s. So named for Nikita Khrushchev, Soviet first secretary at the time. Jugla is a peripheral district of Jugla made up mostly of Soviet housing and with a largely Russian-speaking population.
3. The character Karlsson-on-the-Roof, created by the Swedish children’s author Astrid Lindgren – best known in English-speaking countries for her Pippi Longstocking books – who was extremely popular in the Soviet Union.
4. Mehukatti is a concentrated Finnish syrup, which could be used to make orange juice by diluting it with water at a 1:5 proportion.
5. The Suiti people are a tiny Catholic ethnographic group concentrated around the town of Alsunga in western Latvia. Suiti women are well known in Latvia for their distinctive folk costumes and drone singing.
This article originally appeared on Satori. Translated from Latvian by Will Mawhood.
Ivars Drulle is a sculptor working in the field of visual arts, creating works ranging from small groups of figures to huge installations, often incorporating story-telling, sound and text elements.
© Deep Baltic 2025. All rights reserved.
Like what Deep Baltic does? Please consider making a monthly donation – help support our writers and in-depth coverage of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Find out more at our Patreon page.
