A Chat With VOVICIO About “Out Of Cage”

Q: Hi! You’ve had quite a whirlwind journey over the past few years—moving across the world to Buenos Aires and building a whole new life. How is Argentina treating you so far, and how has the local vibe influenced your headspace? 

I fell in love with Buenos Aires almost immediately. I love the architecture, the huge green parks, the wide avenues and all these quiet, shady streets. I understand why people often compare Buenos Aires to Europe, but for me it still feels very authentic, with its own character and atmosphere.

You can really feel that in the music too. There is this whole world of Argentine rock that has been iconic here for decades, and before moving here I knew absolutely nothing about it. My knowledge of Argentine music basically ended with Natalia Oreiro and *Cambio Dolor*, because that song was constantly on Russian TV when I was a kid. Oreiro is actually almost a cult figure in Russia, everybody knows her. But Soda Stereo, Sumo and this whole huge rock culture were completely new to me, so discovering all of that here was really exciting.

There is also a different attitude to time in Argentina. Things often happen later than planned, plans can change, and at first it can be frustrating. But after a while you start accepting it and become a little more relaxed yourself.

And people here are much more emotionally open and physical than I was used to. People kiss you on the cheek when they greet you, even if you barely know each other or have just met. It can be your trainer at the gym, your barber, or a doctor you’re seeing for the first time. At first I found it pretty funny and unusual, but now I don’t even think about it. It just feels completely normal.

Q: Starting completely over in a new country with a different culture and language is a huge leap. When you first landed in Buenos Aires, what was the moment you realized, “Okay, I can actually rebuild my life and my music here”? 

Actually, that realization came much later than the moment I started making music again. Immigration is not a vacation. Apart from the financial and practical difficulties, it can be emotionally exhausting, especially when you know that you can’t simply go back to the life you had before.

There are a lot of ups and downs. One day everything feels exciting and full of possibilities, and the next you can feel completely lost. In that situation, it’s difficult to think about a career or make serious long-term plans.

I had already started making music again, but for a long time I didn’t think of it as the beginning of a new musical life. I was just making music because it was something I wanted and needed to do at that moment, without thinking too much about where it could lead.

I think the change happened only quite recently. At some point I realized that I had already been making music here for a few years, meeting musicians, recording, writing new songs, and none of it felt temporary anymore. That was probably when I first thought: okay, maybe I’m not just making music after moving to another country. Maybe I can actually build a new musical life here.

Q: Before launching your solo work, you were touring and recording studio albums as a guitarist and backing vocalist with Dmitry Spirin. What was it like jumping straight into that fast-paced punk energy in Argentina, and how did that experience push you back toward writing your own songs? 

Just a small correction: Dmitry and I did record two studio albums together, but the first time I’ll actually go on tour with him as his guitarist will be this November, across several cities in Europe. Before that, we’ve only played a couple of acoustic sets and one full show in Buenos Aires. We had planned it earlier, but for different reasons it only worked out now.

As for punk rock, it wasn’t really a jump into something completely new for me. I’ve listened to this kind of music since I was a kid, and I know American and European punk pretty well. I’ve also known Tarakany! since I was a kid, long before I met Dmitry personally. So musically, it all felt quite familiar to me.

But with these albums, the genre was less important to me than the reason we were making them in the first place. They were political statements, and music was simply the most natural way to express that. After the war started, I felt a strong need to say through songs what I thought about what was happening, about the war and about the Russian regime. So the whole process felt very natural to me.

And I think constantly working on songs gradually brought me back to my own writing as well. When you spend a lot of time writing, arranging and recording again, you start thinking not only as a guitarist, but as a songwriter too. Slowly, more and more of my own ideas started coming back, and at some point I realized that I wanted to write my own music again.

Q: Let’s talk about “Out of Cage”. Sonically, it blends atmospheric guitars, big indie-pop hooks, and cinematic layers. When you were sitting down to record it, what kind of mood or feeling were you trying to capture in the production? 

I wanted the song to have this feeling of lightness and moving forward. The lyrics deal with some difficult things, like identity, fear, and the limits that can be imposed on us by society, family, culture, the state, and sometimes by ourselves. But I really didn’t want the music to sound dark or hopeless.

For me, *Out of Cage* had to feel like release, like after a long period of tension you can finally breathe a little easier. That’s why there is a lot of space in the production, atmospheric guitars and a big, open chorus. The lyrics describe the cage, but I wanted the music to already sound like you’re getting out of it. By the end, I wanted the song to leave more of a feeling of hope and freedom than heaviness.

Q: The track feels very deeply personal, touching on themes of breaking through fear and stepping away from “invisible cages”. Was there a specific moment or breaking point that sparked the lyrics for this song? 

I think immigration was probably the ground this song grew out of. I left a country whose political regime I consider dictatorial and fascist, and which still keeps going after its own citizens even after they leave. For me, leaving was already a kind of escape from one very big cage. Some of my friends who stayed there describe how they feel in very similar terms.

At the same time, in Russia people often say about those who leave, “Nobody needs you there.” And honestly, that’s fine.

Once I was far away from that familiar environment, I started noticing other limits that I had still brought with me. Things from childhood, fear of judgment, shame, the habit of thinking about what other people might say. Sometimes you catch yourself acting according to some very old internal rule that has nothing to do with your life now or with how you actually want to live.

So I don’t think there was one specific trigger for the song. The cage metaphor developed gradually from that whole experience. I physically got out of one very big cage and genuinely felt more free, but at the same time I realized that some of the old limits were still inside me. I think that feeling eventually became the chorus: I don’t have to destroy the whole world around me. Sometimes it’s enough to step outside the cage you’ve been living in.

Q: Because “Out of Cage” carries such heavy themes of freedom and identity, did writing it feel more like a release of emotional baggage or a celebration of a fresh start? 

Neither, really. I don’t think writing the song helped me get rid of some emotional baggage, and I definitely didn’t see it as a celebration of a fresh start. These things usually don’t disappear just because you wrote a song about them.

For me, it was more a way to express what I was thinking about at that time and what was genuinely bothering me. Writing a song about something and actually freeing yourself from it are still two different things.

I decided to share these thoughts because I think a lot of people deal with similar feelings and problems. Maybe someone will recognize themselves in the song, and maybe for someone it can give a little hope or relief.

Q: You handled writing, performing, and producing the track yourself, while teaming up with Alexey Kuznetsov for drum recording, mixing, and mastering. How did you two approach shaping the overall sound, and what was that studio collaboration like? 

Actually, it was less of a studio collaboration and more of an apartment one. I record my music at home, like a lot of musicians do now. You really don’t need that much anymore: a laptop, an audio interface, a couple of guitars, a few microphones, and that’s enough to build almost the whole track.

Alexey and I also worked remotely. I sent him an almost finished version of the song with drums that I had programmed in a plugin, and he suggested recording live drums over it. The only thing I asked was not to make the part too complicated. I wanted to keep a pretty minimal groove, without long fills or too much showing off. Alexey understood that perfectly and played exactly what the song needed.

As for the mix and the overall sound, we didn’t really discuss references or try to copy any particular band. Alexey and I have known each other and worked together from time to time for almost twenty years, so I know very well how he hears music and how he mixes. My brief was basically: “Alexey, don’t reinvent the wheel. Just do what you do.” The only thing I really wanted was for everything to feel balanced and still keep the groove.

So in the end, the sound came from a mix of my home recordings, programmed drums, Alexey’s live playing, and his mix. He’s a great drummer and engineer, and I really hope we’ll do more things like this together.

Q: Coming from a background playing live punk shows into creating solo music that blends cinematic alternative rock and indie pop, how did you find your distinct sonic voice? Did your musical influences shift along the way? 

I wouldn’t say I really came from the punk scene. Before emigrating, I spent almost ten years playing in a shoegaze/dream-pop band. And inside that band there was always a bit of a creative push and pull. Some of the other members were more interested in a noisier, more formless kind of shoegaze, almost noisegaze, where everything turns into one big wall of sound. I was usually the one pushing things toward more structure, melody and balance. I wanted the atmosphere and the noise to stay, but I also wanted there to be a song underneath that you could actually hear and remember.

Within that band, we found some kind of balance between those approaches. But when I started making music on my own, I no longer had to look for that compromise with other people. I just went further in the direction that had always felt more natural to me: clearer song structures, more melody, and a cleaner, more balanced sound. At the same time, I kept some things from shoegaze, like the atmosphere, the sense of space, layered guitars and certain textures.

So I don’t think my influences changed that much. The balance between them changed. That way of thinking about songs stayed with me, but now melody, structure and a cleaner production have a much bigger place in my music.

Q: When listeners put on headphones and hear “Out of Cage” for the very first time, what do you hope hits them first—the dynamic arrangement or the message behind the track? 

Honestly, I’d never really thought about what I want people to notice first. For me, a good song has to work as a whole. There is so much music now that sometimes one small thing is enough to push a listener away. It can be the lyrics or the production, but it can also be my accent, my voice, the tempo, or just one part of the chorus.

And that’s why I don’t think it makes sense to try to make everything perfect for everyone. The same thing one person doesn’t like can be exactly what another person loves.

So with *Out of Cage*, I wanted everything to feel balanced, but I also wanted it to sound like me, with my real voice, my accent and the way I actually play. Especially now, when a lot of people make music with AI and you can get a perfect robo-voice with perfect robo-vocal technique, hitting every note perfectly, probably trained on half of the Sony Music catalog.

I’m not interested in that. I care much more about personality and honesty. I hope the people who like my music care about that too.

Q: Releasing your very first single under a brand-new solo project can be equal parts exciting and terrifying. How does it feel putting something so personal out into the world under your own name? 

Honestly, it didn’t scare me at all. I really like this feeling, because I had been moving toward a solo project for a long time.

Even when I was playing in bands in Russia, I was already writing complete songs. It wasn’t just a guitar riff, some chords or lyrics. I could come up with the whole arrangement, vocal parts and drums, record a demo and bring the band an almost fully produced track. So at some point I started realizing that I didn’t really need a band in order to create music.

At the same time, when I was in bands, I often felt that I didn’t get as much attention as the amount of work I was actually doing. I was writing music, arranging songs and taking care of a lot of other things around the band, but I still often stayed in the background. That’s pretty natural in a band, because most of the attention usually goes to the singer or the front person. But after a while, that wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to exist as an artist on my own, and I wanted people to connect the music I was creating directly with me.

So releasing the first single under my own solo project was simply a very happy moment for me. I knew I had made a good song, I was happy with how it sounded, and I wanted people to hear it. It felt like I had finally arrived at something I had been thinking about for many years, and now I can build a project that fully reflects my own musical vision.

Q: Looking back at everything you’ve been through to reach this milestone, what has being an independent artist taught you about resilience and trusting your own instinct? 

I think one of the main things I’ve learned is that it’s important to separate good music from a successful music project. They are not necessarily the same thing.

When you’re younger, it’s easy to believe in this simple formula: talent plus hard work equals success. But the longer I’ve been making music, the more I’ve realized that talent and hard work alone are not enough. You can write a great song or even a great album, and that still doesn’t automatically mean you’ve built a successful project.

If your main goal is to create something honest and meaningful to you, then I think you should trust your own instinct completely and make the music you want to make.

But if your goal is to build a successful career in the music industry, music is only one part of it. Budgets, promotion, the right team, positioning, social media and understanding your audience can matter just as much, and sometimes even more.

So I’ve learned to separate these two kinds of success. Creative success for me is writing a song that I genuinely believe in and feel proud of. Building a successful music project is a completely different challenge. Of course, I hope I can do both, but one doesn’t automatically lead to the other.

Q: To wrap things up—”Out of Cage” is officially out, and it’s the start of a bigger chapter. What is next for you throughout the rest of this year? Are we looking at more singles, live shows in Buenos Aires, or a full debut album on the horizon? 

I feel good about those comparisons. I really like Beach House — I even have a couple of their records on vinyl. Do I think my music sounds like them? Maybe in some ways, yes. Do I consciously use them as a reference when I’m writing? Not really.

But of course, the music you listen to shapes your taste and the way you hear things. So it would be strange to pretend that bands like Beach House or Mazzy Star haven’t influenced me at all. That influence is probably there somewhere, even if I’m not thinking about it directly when I write.

As for what I bring to that dreamy space, I honestly don’t really think of myself as part of a dream-pop scene, so it’s difficult for me to answer. I’m not trying to bring something new to a genre, reinvent it or push its boundaries. I just like a certain kind of sound, I know how to create it, and I use it when it feels right for the song.

So maybe it’s not so much about what I bring to dream pop, but what that music brings into my songs. In the end, I just want to express myself and make music that feels like me.