This post is everything about ‘Gender ID’: the band, the family, the memory.
This text will be updated. I am writing it to leave a remembrance of some good times we had with my band ‘Gender ID’, and it is dedicated to the loving memory of my dearest friend and collaborator Danya Kostrov.
If anybody has any photos, videos and other materials with ‘Gender ID’, and if you want to share them – please contact me gene(at)bogolepov(dot)eu
Berlin, 04.02.2023
xx Gene
2006
On the 4th of February 2006 ‘Gender ID’ played their very first live show in St. Petersburg at Plug&Play Festival.
It had been originally planned that my previous band T-Lazarus would perform at that festival. The project was going into indefinite hiatus, but I didn’t want to lose a nice slot at an interesting event, so I told the promoters I’d perform under my new moniker Gender ID. It was two months before the festival and I thought I’d figure something out. Also I had some fresh material, so it was exciting to work on a completely new project.
I invited my friends Danya Kostrov and Alisa Krizhan to form my new band. Haha, and I think this is our first ever photo all together (as a band, I mean):

Within a month or even less we developed around 5-6 songs and rehearsed them for the gig at Plug&Play Festival, but we felt like it was not enough so we wrote one more song between soundcheck and show – and this song was completely stupid and became our biggest hit in a few coming months.
Ladies & queers, I give you “Sex & Bubbles”! I’m still laughing so hard remembering how we wrote this cursed song while Alisa was ironing her clothes, and sparkling wine galore was there to save us from anxiety of the first show.
The project was initially thought of as a fun endeavour where we wanted to research the MTV culture, where form is much more important than content. A sort of a post-modernist experiment to see how far would we go with this. And well, we got somewhere – that year we played at Stereoleto Festival, sharing stage with Sparks, Ladytron and Gotan Project, and then went on to play a few headline shows around Russia.









In November 2006 we completed our debut album ‘Home Kids And Bathroom Romance‘ which only saw its symbolic and limited DIY release on the 11th of November, 2007.

Meanwhile the year 2006 was coming to an end, and I started sliding back into depression. I suppose that I wanted less of entertainer’s role and more of a narrator. Sort of a collector of my own stories and fantasies who can sometimes go out there and share them, hoping for understanding and longing to be visible.
2007
to be continued…