Aleksei Rybin

For the Russian footballer, see Aleksey Rybin.

Aleksei Viktorovich Rybin (Russian: Алексей Викторович Рыбин; nicknamed Ryba; born December 21, 1960, Leningrad) is a Soviet and Russian musician, co-founder and lead guitarist of the rock band Kino and a member of its first line-up; producer, publisher, journalist, presenter on St. Petersburg's Radio Rocks, publicist, screenwriter, novelist.

Aleksei Rybin Алексей Рыбин
Rybin (right) with Dmitry Puchkov in 2022
Background information
Born	(1960-12-21) December 21, 1960 Leningrad, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
Occupation	guitarist
Instrument	Electric guitar

Biography

Aleksei Rybin was born in 1960 in Leningrad. He became interested in rock music while studying at school. In 1976 he joined the hard rock band Pilgrims as a guitarist and vocalist. After graduating from school he entered the Leningrad Higher Technical School, where he studied for more than two years. In 1978, while still a student, he met Andrei Panov, soon to become the leader of the punk band "Automatic Satisfiers", with whom he later performed several times as a guitarist at underground concerts.

Working with Viktor Tsoi and Kino

In 1980, Rybin met and became friends with Viktor Tsoi at Panov's place, and together with him, in the summer of 1981, he founded the band Garin and the Hyperboloids (its third member was Oleg Valinsky), later renamed Kino. Within Kino, Rybin acted as guitarist and also acted as the band's director for some time. Tsoi and Rybin joined the Leningrad Rock Club and recorded Kino's first album, called "45".

In the fall of 1982, Tsoi and Rybin recorded songs in the studio of the Maly Drama Theater with drummer Valery Kirilov and sound engineer Andrei Kuskov. The musicians ended up not liking the sound of the drums and the session was abandoned. In 1992, based on these recordings, the collection "Unknown Songs" (published as Tsoi's solo album) would be released. Alexey recorded the guitar parts of tracks 6-15. In 1983, he left the band as a result of a personal conflict with Tsoi.

In 2017, he acted as a film director, directing a full-length feature film "Soon Everything Will End". At the 2nd Urals Film Festival of Russian Cinema in Yekaterinburg, the film was awarded a special prize by Rossiyskaya Gazeta and its online festival "Double dv@" "For successful experience of artistic analysis of topical social problems".

In 2019, Alexey Rybin, using the original name "Kino", assembled the collective "Garin and Hyperboloids". The new team's repertoire is based on covers of songs by Viktor Tsoi and Mike Naumenko, with Rybin using only those Kino songs to which he has a historical relation. In 2021, Alexey Rybin's Garin and Hyperboloids released their debut album Ekstrada, which included 5 covers of Kino songs - "Idleman", "Beatnik", "General", "I Don't Like the City of Moscow" and "Just Want You to Know".