Ode to a Friend

Or how I’m overcoming gatekeeper-instilled limiting beliefs - Pt. 2

Note from Riri: Oh my, I stand corrected - looks like this is going to be a three-part essay after all! I’m turning into one of those novelist ladies! But oh well, sometimes the story dictates the way it has to be told - so bear with me, will ya?

For Pt. 1 please kindly proceed here.

Also, you should totally watch that video that the photos in this post are taken from!

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Gosha as seen in the live video by Sololaki Space Station titled “katalikosi (live from sin3)”

Last week we left off at my lowest moment, at the tail end of my five year long imprisonment in the confines of the tower of false beliefs my former collaborator N. had built around me. Five years since I wrote my first songs. Five years of incompletion. Five years of “I know better”.

It was around that time that I reignited my friendship with Gosha Pinchuk - a friendship that might just have saved my life, metaphorically speaking. Funnily enough, I had met Gosha within a month of meeting N. - he was the bassist in the live band of Parks, Squares and Alleys - the first act I had ever put on as a promoter in Berlin back in 2019.

The guys from Parks, Squares and Alleys had crashed at my apartment for their Berlin show that November and that’s how Gosha and I met. Apparently he had just joined the live band a month prior to that show - something he told me years later - which makes this chance encounter 90% chance and only 10% encounter, if you ask me. It’s funny how many important things in our lives are in actuality true miracles, hanging by a thread, happening just barely, isn’t it?

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Though I met Gosha before even writing my first song, we stayed in touch for quite a while - talking about nerdy music shit, equipment, favourite artists and much more. The friendship seemed to have eventually fizzled out, at least in the shape that I knew it, given the fact that we lived in different cities and that my field of vision had been completely taken over by N.’s projections and promises.

I didn’t forget about Gosha though. As N.’s mixing efforts for our record continued to stretch out indefinitely, I brought up again and again that Gosha might be a good choice to hire as a mixing engineer.

N.’s response?

“I have fifteen years of experience and a good standing in the music industry - therefore there’s no way YOU of the two of us could know someone of any significant skill. Who is this guy anyway? Is he Russian? He’ll probably do a really lousy job and scam us on top of that - I’ve never had a good experience working with a Russian!”

And so I waited. And waited. And waited. The worst part of it all was that N. kept promising the mixes would be finished within a couple of days - for two and a half years. For two and a half years I was Bill Murray - waking up every morning to the same radio show, walking past the same puddle, having the same conversations, clawing at the walls of this prison, going insane, dying inside.

In the fall of 2023 I went through a friendship breakup that triggered one of the biggest songwriting stretches I’ve had to date - I wrote eleven songs in a matter of three or four months. And throughout those eleven songs I slowly started fleshing out my demos more and more - each one more detailed and multi-layered than the last - my first ever so timid steps in song production.

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N. immediately put a claim on those songs: either I pledged them to our project or he was going to leave me hanging. It was either two records or none.

I got scared. I stayed. But a different thought slowly crept in: What if in some distant future I could write songs just by myself and produce them exactly to my taste? Certainly, I could never be a good producer, and neither could anyone else apart from N. - he did a damn good job convincing me of that. But maybe, someday, somehow I wouldn’t be so afraid?

One of those days I found Gosha’s number and tentatively reached out to him - “Would you be interested in helping me produce my solo songs - not now, of course, but sometime in the future?”

More Gosha, from the same video! Seriously, check it out!

Gosha immediately agreed, before having heard even one of my demos.

In the following weeks I sent him some of my newest material - songs that were now locked up in my project with N. - just to give Gosha and understanding of what he was potentially getting himself into. He got back to me saying those demos were hit material - his words, not mine - that he would be delighted to work on whatever I brought to him next and that he would make sure we got the best out of them.

That was the moment our friendship got reignited. It was like a snap of fingers - we picked up right where we left off as if the five years in between hadn’t happened. We started talking a lot, making plans, vague as they might be. Somewhere in between those conversations I shared what I was going through with my primary project and Gosha was the first person who outright told me: This is not normal. This is not how things are done.

Still, I kept holding on - situations like this are notoriously difficult to escape. By the end of 2024 I was so fed up with the infinite mixing predicament that I wasn’t quite myself anymore. I shared my woes with Gosha and he got curious to hear those supposedly unmixable songs for himself. He suggested he could try mixing one of them for free to see if he could do a good job on them.

I called N. and insisted that he should give me the stems for one of the songs - the one that turned out the worst in each of his attempts. I mailed the stems to Gosha.

Two days went by with no news and on the third day I heard a notification ding from my phone - the rough mix was there. I opened the messenger and stared at the play button.

I was afraid to press it. I was afraid to hear the mix, I was afraid it would further prove the fact that my songs were unfixable.

I called Gosha and he spent easily half an hour trying to cajole me into listening. Finally, I pressed play and the song started on my speakers. My roommate and I listened carefully, silently. When the playback ended, my roommate said: “This song never quite sounded like a song to me before, but THIS is something I’d definitely listen to!”

I burst out crying.

The following day I put my foot down with N.: “WE ARE MIXING THIS RECORD WITH GOSHA”. He agreed easily - in fact he was as taken aback by the test mix as I was.

The next month and a half I spent every single one of my evenings - work or no work - on Zoom with Gosha, mixing the album. The process was extremely time-consuming and required us fixing and concealing multiple imperfections in the over-processed, overly ripe - almost rotting at this point - stems. We went as far as essentially rearranging whole parts in several songs to bring them to their older selves, to the way I wrote them.

N. joined us on Zoom towards the end of the process, to provide feedback and reconcile our visions of the mix. I suppose he could sense the rapport that Gosha and I had developed, he could sense the possibility for change, the danger of change.

He made several attempts at discrediting my personality in front of Gosha right in those calls. He would take a minor disagreement on an aspect of a mix and blow it out of proportion only to then chide and belittle me - smiling at Gosha intermittently, apologising for how crazy, how petty, how silly I was.

If he were lucky, he’d plant the seed of conflict between us, he’d convince Gosha I was to be avoided. I would be his to have, with no chances to escape.

Thankfully, Gosha remained unmoved by N.’s theatrics. He stood by me through those humiliating moments, talking to me privately and reassuring me he was not buying any of that. Seeing his unwavering support convinced me I wanted to continue working with him on whatever came next.

In the weeks that it took us to finish the mixing we talked a lot about our respective creative aspirations. Those nights and those conversations - they are the lullaby of The Ririverse, its true birthday and birthplace.

On the last mixing call I mused how I was going to start writing a diary again with the sole purpose of commemorating that day: “HAVE WE JUST FINISHED MIXING THAT RECORD?!” Gosha responded by reminding me of that one time we’d discussed Substack - how we both had created an account but hadn’t posted anything yet.

“I’m finishing my first post at the moment”, - he said. - “Why don’t you start writing there as well, instead of putting your music journey in a diary?”

“But I named my Substack “The Ririverse” and there’s no Ririverse yet…”

“There will be, once you post that first essay”.

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And so here we are! Come back next week for the (hopefully?!) final part of this story - the part in which I actually get to produce some music!