condition (records/cover): NM / VG+ (very small writing on back)

The title translates as "Extraterrestrials" or "Aliens," and the timing is exact: 1990, Melodiya, the final year of the Soviet state record label in its original form, pressed in an edition of five thousand copies. A document of a particular Soviet underground - the world of composers and improvisers who had spent years navigating the gap between what the system permitted and what they needed to make.

Sergei Samoilov belongs to a generation of Russian musicians who worked at the intersection of the formal academy, electronic experimentation, and something harder to classify: the meditative, extended music that emerged in the 1980s from composers who had absorbed ambient music, minimalism, and the rich tradition of Soviet piano writing and distilled them into a practice that fit none of the available categories neatly. Piano and synthesizers throughout - the two instruments in close dialogue, sometimes indistinguishable, the electronic textures serving not to replace acoustic material but to extend it into registers where the piano's natural resonance runs out. His earlier Antigravitation: Meditation at the Piano (Melodiya) established the terrain; Пришельцы expands it, the title's cosmological reference suggesting not mere novelty but a fundamental displacement - music reaching toward something that has no adequate name in the available vocabulary.

One of the most searched-for items in the Soviet experimental catalog, and one of the rarest. Original 1990 pressing.