Red Wave: An American in the Soviet music underground
In the 1980s, a young American from Los Angeles, Joanna Stingray, crossed the Iron Curtain and became part of Leningrad’s musical underground — a world where rock was an act of freedom and every song a protest against the system.
During one of her first trips to the USSR, Stingray met Boris Grebenshchikov, Viktor Tsoi, Yuri Kasparyan, and Sergey Kuryokhin — artists who forever changed Russian culture. Fascinated by their courage, in 1986 she made possible the release of the groundbreaking U.S. album Red Wave: 4 Underground bands from the Soviet Union, which brought the sound of the forbidden world to the West for the first time.
Red Wave is an autobiographical story, written together with her daughter Madison, about love, rebellion, friendship, and art stronger than politics. It is also a vivid portrait of life in the Soviet Union at the twilight of the Cold War, seen through the eyes of an outsider who became the voice of an entire generation of artists.
The book features legendary figures of Russian rock and art (including Grebenshchikov, Tsoi, Kasparyan, Kinchev, Novikov) as well as Western icons such as David Bowie and Andy Warhol. Enriched with unpublished photos from the author’s private archive, it captures the time when rock’n’roll became a tool of freedom and art a form of resistance.
The book is available for purchase on the KARTA Center’s website: ksiegarnia.karta.org.pl.
