Zorge and Optimystica Orchestra: Evgeny Fedorov's other two bands

Zorge started in September 2010, soon after Fedorov announced the end of Tequilajazzz. At first it was a duo with the drummer Marc-Oliver Lauber, a German living in St Petersburg. The two had met about ten years earlier in Cologne, where Lauber played in the German version of the psychobilly band The Meantraitors. Guitarists Vadim Sergeyev, formerly of Splean, and Dmitry Zilpert of the Moscow band Tinavie turned the duo into a quartet.

The name points to the Soviet spy Richard Sorge, and Fedorov named spy fiction and films, John le Carré among them, as an inspiration. Talking to The Moscow Times, he listed punk rock, new wave and art rock and said he no longer feared the label art rock. He called the sound close to Tequilajazzz but more experimental, and gave the idea in one line: "We're Tequilajazzz, only better." The Moscow debut took place on 18 February 2011 at the club 16 Tons.

The second Zorge album, Chto my znaem o ravnovesii? (What Do We Know About Balance?), came out in 2013. The musicians started rehearsing, noticed they had enough songs for a record and picked ten of those they had written. They recorded from late summer into early autumn at the Dobrolyot studio with Andrei Alyakrinsky. Fedorov told Afisha that it was shorter, lighter and less perfectionist than its predecessor, a rock record with deliberately rough edges. The single Chto utail Vatikan? (What Did the Vatican Conceal?) premiered on Afisha Daily on 5 December 2013, and Fedorov said the title asks whether truth exists in the world and has no religious intent.

Optimystica Orchestra works on a different principle. Fedorov gathers musicians from well-known Russian rock bands, they appear in strict suits, and they play polished pop with a soft jazz feel. The repertoire combines songs written for the project with reworked Tequilajazzz numbers, and the styles range from ska to bossa nova. Its members tour with their own bands, so the orchestra performs rarely.

In September 2018 the orchestra released the single Dozhd/Len (Rain/Laziness). Dozhd began as a Zorge song, and Fedorov said the orchestra took it over because it had more unrealised potential there. Meduza called it a melancholic autumn ballad with a real orchestra, solos for winds, strings and piano, and quotations from films. Fedorov described it as a thank-you to the Leningrad cinema Spartak, where he and his friends watched classic films in a cold hall and then walked out into the St Petersburg rain. On 25 July 2019 the orchestra played at the Green Theatre at VDNKh in Moscow in a programme called 8 Women. Eight women from the independent scene, among them the singer Tatiana Zykina and the poet Vera Polozkova, performed orchestra songs while the musicians wore classical costumes. The organisers billed it as a one-time lineup.

The 2021 single Nemnogo navek (A Little Forever), the first in three years, grew from piano sketches. Fedorov recorded them on a dictaphone while visiting his mother, a piano teacher, on Vasilievsky Island. An injury had kept him from playing bass for about four months, so he wrote at the piano. The band learned the songs quickly, played them live and recorded them the next day, the way old jazz bands worked, and Fedorov used his 1975 synthesizer. He declined to explain the lyrics and gave the theme as the eternal struggle of a Petersburg introvert with claustrophobia. For Tequilajazzz and Zorge he writes on the bass, and Optimystica songs used to come from a worn nylon-string guitar. In his view the instrument in a composer's hands shapes the music.