Dissident Saint

What later became Dissident Saint started in the summer of 2003, with the co-operation of Gera Kisselman and Sergey Perunov. They did not intend for a certain genre of music, nor any mission statement for the band at the time. It was simply a collection of some ideas which they knew they had to act on, and those ideas would later become the early Dissident Saint songs (or else, lurking jokes).

Perunov and Kisselman assembled a band out of their acquaintances, practiced and wrote some material. Faces changed along the way, but the band’s life came to be with its first show on November 25, 2004. By then, Alon Shenfield, who was a long time friend of Kisselman’s, joined on as the bassist while Ilya Maximenko got onboard playing guitar and introduced the band to a new drummer – Dimitry Chebanov, while Ilya Kosukhin was playing keys.

Although it was never planned to happen this way, Dissident Saint assembled itself out of a musically diverse bunch. With influences old and new, classically trained and self taught, the band established its unique sound. The various musical tastes of all the band members made it impossible for Dissident Saint to submit to one particular style – a unique characteristic that helped the band stand out from the numerous other groups in the Canadian music scene.

The early days of Dissident Saint were extremely productive. The second show of the band’s existence was a “Band Wars” in which they won first prize. Subsequent gigging hardened the band, and its members picked up some prizes along the way like a first-place turnout in a Supernova Band Wars.

At some point, it became obvious that Dissident Saint needed to make an album – a first definite step that the band had to make to solidify its existence. With more material ready than it was possible to learn, the question boiled down to time and financial constraints. It also became apparent to that whatever the members did as a band, they had to do it themselves. Their experiences wi