Edmund Shkliarskiy

The person, I`m writing about, is my favorite musician Edmund Shkliarskiy. I respect him a lot and it’s not by chance: all his creative work is very close to me, though it’s quite esoteric.

I’ll begin with some biographic facts about my hero. Edmund Mechislavovich Shkliarskiy was born on the 26th of September in 1955 in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in a family with strong musical traditions. When Edmund was 8 years old, he got his first guitar. When he was 13, he wrote his first song, called “Velikan” (“The Giant”). Edmund used to learn to play the piano in a music school. In 1981 Edmund Shkliarskiy came to the rock-band Piknik as a guitarist. In a year, he became the leader of this band, and Piknik made their first album “Dym” (“The Smoke”).

Now Edmund Shkliarskiy is the poet, the composer and the leader of Piknik. He is also the creator of their unusual performances. As well as Edmund, there are 3 musicians in the band: Stas Shkliarskiy (Edmund’s son) – the keyboards, Leonid Kirnos – the percussion, and Marat Korchemniy– the bass-guitar. Piknik is quite a famous band in Russia; they play a lot of gigs. During all their history, they have created 18 albums. The last Piknik’s album “Zhelezniye Mantry” (“Iron Mantras”) was made in 2008.

As well as musician, Edmund is a rather talented artist and writer. His surrealistic artistic creativity is quite unusual and symbolist. He writes a book “Net, i nikogda ne budet” (“No, and won’t be”), which consists of a lot of little stories, he often publishes in his Internet-site qazimodo.ru/blog/.

I took the information from: www.piknik.info, 23mm.ru, and from some interviews with Edmund Shkliarskiy.