Photo by Olya Runyova

Scaly Whale is a title-paradox which Pavel Doronin uses for thinking out, recording and performing his rhythmical full-of-melodies music.

“Long ago, when I was about 19 years old, I was pondering about pseudonym for myself. I had thought about something that could make people ‘stumble’ and accidentally remembered the phrase from Pyotr Yershov’s fairytale ‘The Little Humpbacked Horse’ (‘Konyok-Gorbunok’) about ‘Marvel Fish-Whale’. As we were told in school at biology lessons, a whale is a mammal but not fish — so he can’t have any type of scale by definition. I decided to leave my whale with the scale because exactly such a kind of pseudonym can make people ‘stumbling’ and saying: ‘Nothing of the sort! A whale can’t have scale because he’s not a fish!’. And I would answer to this: ‘But my whale can have it!’.

MS-DOS tracker which I used for making music at the very beginning wasn’t able to support Cyrillic symbols — so I translated my pseudonym into English and was astonished: it looks and sounds like a wave: ‘scaly whale’, ‘~~’.”

Pavel’s desire to be oriented on live performances has come into being when he bought used synthesizer ‘Polyvox’ via a free-private-advertisement newspaper and became stronger with a buying of a groove box. Sound control without intermediation of keyboard and computer mouse turned to be fantastic experience which have shaped destiny of Scaly Whale as a music project.

While performing live, Pavel forgets about his other professions (journalist, translator, and teacher) and operates with a setup of electronic music devices. At the same time video art is showed on a screen (or on a wall which replacing it). In such a way an audience gets not only the interesting music but also rather interesting spectacle.

“Live actions allow me to get feedback immediately and to see right away: yes, my music has the influence, it makes people more joyful and happy. The best of possible conditions is when you — in a sweat, just have done your best on a stage — come out on a dancefloor and be saluted by those who enjoy your tunes, appreciates your work and thanks you for a great concert. I suppose, that is my reason to continue playing music.”

Listen to some music by Scaly Whale: