THE FULL STORY FROM EGOR FEDOTOV:
I was born on October 15, 1987, in Kuibyshev (now Samara, Russia). My passion for music began during my school years. It was my father, Vladimir Viktorovich, who taught me the basics of playing the acoustic guitar — he was a drummer himself.
Around the age of 16, I formed my first rock band with friends, specializing in punk rock. I served as both the guitarist and the composer. However, since I was more drawn to heavier sounds, the subsequent bands I participated in shifted towards black metal and metalcore genres. The bands that had the greatest influence on me during those years include: Burzum, Satyricon, Dimmu Borgir, Katatonia, Cradle of Filth, My Dying Bride.
BIO
ДИСКОГРАФИЯ SHIPS FLY UP
2024 - Apostasy (album)
2024 - Apostate (single)
2024 - Only Lovers Left (single)
2023 - Dawn of Sunset (single)
2023 - Genesis (maxi-single)
2022 - Rivers Without Time (album)
2022 - 14 (single)
2022 - Ships Fly Home (single)
2021 - M. I. L. Y. (single)
2020 - Love and Freedom of the Great Ocean (album)
2019 - Ghost Kingdom (album)
2018 - Dream Maker (album)
2017 - Journey to Ranucan (album)
In 2007–2009, I was actively performing at local venues — such as the rock bar «Podval» and the «Olimp» club. Our rehearsals mostly took place in specially equipped garages or a private house.
One of these «musical» garages was located right next to a psychiatric clinic. Once, when our entire band was heading to another rehearsal, we witnessed a rather unusual scene: someone in a hospital gown climbed over the tall wall of the clinic and hurriedly left the premises. We were lucky that they didn’t end up in our garage!
We also spent a long time rehearsing in the evenings at a old wooden house in a residential area. The owner of this rehearsal space was a man named Roma. He was a tall, large man with long black hair, a beard, and a deep voice. All the musicians — mostly teenagers — treated him with great respect.
Despite his imposing appearance and intimidating look, Roma was a polite person. However, he didn’t tolerate it when young metal musicians misadjusted the amplifiers, causing «unpleasant» sounds to come from the speakers. Roma always remained calm and patiently explained how to properly adjust the sound.
One evening, my band and I accidentally messed up the settings on the combo amp, which resulted in an extremely loud, deafening «unpleasant» noise. As if on purpose, Roma walked into the house just at that moment and heard the guitar «roar».
Apparently unable to restrain himself — and realising that his voice would be drowned out by the screeching sounds — Roma blurted out a rather colourful expletive: «****ups!» Coincidentally, the «unpleasant sound» disappeared right at that moment, and his outburst echoed like thunder in the dead silence.
This created an awkward pause that all of us remembered for a long time. Although Roma continued to be polite, we became much more careful about adjusting the sound — not only at that rehearsal space, but at all other venues as well.
In 2009, as a member and one of the founders of the band Cross One’s Heart, I performed in Saint Petersburg at the Koma‑Fest festival. The headliners were:
- Bony NEM, led by Kirill Nemolyaev (producer of Slot);
- Koma, led by Alexander Goodwin (a guitarist of Bony NEM);
- Dekabr.
At the time, I was in my fifth year at university. The curator of my faculty was reluctant to approve an absence for what I considered a valid reason — but I decided to go anyway. The journey in a third‑class train carriage took about two days.
When we arrived at the Orlandina club, we were treated to a free meal of hot solyanka (a traditional Russian soup) and shown to a large dressing room. It was well‑equipped: besides a sofa, it had a spacious area with a sink and a shower.
Suddenly, Alexander Goodwin entered the dressing room. Back then, he was quite a prominent figure in metal circles — especially for us, a band from the provinces (the festival was actually created around his band Koma). He headed towards the shower area.
At that moment, our bassist — also named Alexander — was inside. He was bent over, rinsing his head with water from the showerhead. When Goodwin opened the door and saw the room was occupied, he tactfully said, “Excuse me,” and left.
Our Sasha, who knew Koma’s lyrics by heart, was deeply impressed. He couldn’t believe he’d looked up while rinsing his hair — in a rather undignified pose, thousands of kilometres from home — and saw the leader of his favourite band.
It’s worth noting that our performance went well. The St. Petersburg audience received us warmly and even shouted “Encore!” at the end. We were tempted to go back on stage, but unfortunately, the organisers wouldn’t allow it — the time allotted for each band was strictly regulated.
Details on:
DARKSIDE.RU и METALLIBRARY.RU
In 2010–2011, I took a break from performing. I was rethinking my musical outlook. After much deliberation, I came to two conclusions: first, being in a band wasn’t enough to fulfil my creative desires; second, the issue of earning a living was pressing.
Gigs didn’t bring in any money — in fact, they often cost me money, and rehearsals certainly weren’t free. Our most «lucrative» concert at the time earned just enough to cover a taxi ride home.
Even then, my musical tastes were evolving into something quite unconventional — both for that era and even by today’s standards. From the very start of my journey, I’d always enjoyed composing more than performing — and specifically, composing instrumental music.
Then one day, it hit me: I should write soundtracks. This opened up a vast, limitless world where my imagination wasn’t confined to just electric guitar, bass, drums, and vocals. In this new realm, I felt true creative freedom and began composing — composing relentlessly.
Once I had accumulated a solid collection of demos, I started searching for contacts at game development studios. It was a long, painstaking process: I scoured websites, forums, online portals, and social media for any relevant leads. I managed to gather around two hundred contacts of people somehow involved in game development. Thankfully, there was a surge of new games on VKontakte (VK) at the time, which gave me plenty of leads to follow.
I carefully sent my compositions and a professional collaboration proposal to each contact. Almost no one replied. The few responses I did get were rejections. But I didn’t lose heart — I believed it was all worth it.
After a long period of anxious waiting, I finally got a message from the renowned company Katauri Interactive — creators of the iconic Space Rangers and King’s Bounty. They said they liked my music and were open to collaborating. At the time, the team at Katauri was developing a new game called Royal Quest.
I stayed in touch with the art director, Alexander Yazynin, who became my guide into the world of game development. They showed me screenshots and explained the mood they wanted for the compositions — and then I got to work.
My first «masterpiece» was torn to shreds. It was completely off the mark. The subsequent «masterpieces» met the same fate — I just couldn’t quite grasp the essence. But as the saying goes, patience and hard work pay off. And lo and behold, one of the later versions hit the nail on the head!
The track was titled Mysterious Wood. For it, I received my very first professional fee — which I promptly spent on a MIDI keyboard, heading straight to a music store. Before that, I had to compose using only an electric guitar, a regular computer keyboard, a mouse, and music production software. The new keyboard made the process much easier: instead of clicking through the piano roll on screen, I could now play the notes on actual, satisfying black‑and‑white keys. Progress!
In this way, I composed over 15 tracks for Royal Quest. Some of them became truly beloved by a portion of the player base and have retained their charm over the years. This marked the beginning of my full‑fledged career as a composer.
My interview for the Royal Quest team:
YouTube | VK Video
Then came other projects. For instance, I composed soundtracks for games such as Kuboom and Polywar. Only later did I learn that they had tens of millions of downloads on the Play Market — an audience I could never have dreamed of during my rock band days.
Later on, I worked on the legendary game War Robots, which has now amassed over 100 million downloads (it was originally called Walking War Robots). For this project, I created a series of tracks for the official trailers. One of these tracks, featured on the game’s YouTube channel, garnered nearly 4 million views.
Another major title in my portfolio was the Hollywood‑backed game Pacific Rim: Breach Wars. The track I composed for it became the property of the film company Legendary Pictures (read more about this in the dedicated article). Of course, there were also smaller‑scale projects.
More projects are available in my PORTFOLIO.
Alongside this work, I was actively composing music for the stock audio marketplace AudioJungle — a total of around a hundred tracks. These were purchased by various bloggers as well as globally renowned companies. Thanks to this, one of my tracks became the main theme in the epic official trailer for the game Pagan Online, developed by Wargaming (the creators of World of Tanks):
There was another unusual story in the run‑up to Journey to Ranucan, involving an American singer who allegedly, out of ignorance, decided to claim one of my tracks as his own. I described this adventure in a separate article.
Now, let me talk about mixing and mastering the releases. The sound engineer for four albums — Journey to Ranucan, Dream Maker, Love and Freedom of the Great Ocean, and Rivers Without Time — was Dmitry Linev from Moscow. I met him while working on the soundtrack for the game Blast‑Off. Dmitry was collaborating with the developers and handled the mixing of that soundtrack. In this way, my connections in the gaming industry somehow carried over into Ships Fly Up.
The album artwork, however, was handled by someone new to me — brnstew. It was her pen that brought to life the covers for Journey to Ranucan (as well as the animated music video for the title track) and Dream Maker.
In 2018, the second album, Dream Maker, was released — still dreamy, but now with touches of darkness. (For full details on all releases, see the MUSIC section.)
Next, 2019 and the album Ghost Kingdom, where I somewhat moved away from the “inspirational” motifs and returned to the roots of my metal youth. An interesting fact from Ships Fly Up’s biography during that period was the dance show Nog Een Dan, held in Leiden, the Netherlands.
The show’s organizer, Rens Borkent, contacted me and said that one of my tracks was a perfect fit for their upcoming performance. I was happy to grant permission, and as a result, the troupe created a striking choreographic piece performed by three European dancers:
- Axel Bourdon (France),
- Salomé Oliveira (Portugal),
- Daphne Verhave (Netherlands).
The piece was set to the composition About Death from Ghost Kingdom.
The theme of death appears in it for a reason. On March 15, 2019 — the day the album was released — my father passed away. He had taught me the basics of music, introduced me to The Beatles, and gave me my first electric guitar. This loss became one of the most intense experiences of my entire life (if not the most intense). Creativity, as best it could, helped me cope with it.
August 2020: Release of the fourth full‑length album, Love and Freedom of the Great Ocean. At the time, these lines came to me as a description:
“One day I despaired. And what do I mean by ‘one day’? It’s happened more than once. In such moments, it’s sometimes unclear whether you’re testing your Path for strength and truth, or whether it’s testing you. Or maybe both. And if the intention is strong, then at such moments something opens up, and you seem to move to the next level. You understand that it was necessary. And the answer comes. It must come — even if you have to invent it yourself. Answering a call is not a dogma read in a smart book. The answer to the call comes from the very depths of our ‘I’. And at that moment, that answer was Love and Freedom of the Great Ocean — the fourth album by Ships Fly Up.”
In general, I like to dedicate new releases — whether an album or a single — to lines that reflect my attitude toward the music, my feelings, or something else that simply arises by the will of the Great Ocean.
2021: The first single released as a standalone work, M.I.L.Y.. It features no overdriven guitars or drums — just a sensual motif I simply couldn’t resist recording.
2022: Another experiment, Ships Fly Home, was released. It added a cello to the lyrical guitars. Later that year came the single 14 — a mystical number I may talk about someday. It played one of the key roles in my life.
October 7, 2022: Rivers Without Time, the fifth full‑length album by Ships Fly Up, was released. Oddly enough, I had written the music for it even before I created the project itself — it had been patiently waiting in the wings. The work turned out to be dynamic, which I think could serve as a solid soundtrack for racing games.
It’s worth noting that all this time I was an independent musician, releasing works through distributors (such as the US‑based CD Baby or Freshtunes). This meant I retained 100 % of the rights to my music.
But at the end of 2022, I was contacted by one of Russia’s largest labels, Rhymes Music, with an offer to become their artist. The roster included popular musicians such as pyrokinesis, aikko, Maybe Baby, Macan, Dora, OG Buda, and others. After carefully analyzing the proposal — despite losing some rights and royalties, and becoming a bit of a black sheep among rappers and pop artists — I decided to agree. It was an opportunity to bring the creativity of Ships Fly Up to a much wider audience, perhaps even to those who had never heard of post‑rock, but might be drawn to it.
After finalizing the legal details and signing the contract, all Ships Fly Up albums and singles were transferred to Rhymes Music’s jurisdiction. I gained my own manager and support team — a setup fundamentally different from the distribution model.
April 2023: As an artist of Rhymes Music, Ships Fly Up released the Genesis maxi‑single, featuring two remixes of early tracks: Catch the Moment and Los Oceangeles. I didn’t choose them on a whim — I wanted to create something out of the ordinary, something the tracks seemed to gravitate toward themselves. Synthwave became the main genre, though — as longtime fans of Ships Fly Up likely know — I rarely confine myself to one direction.
I enjoy enriching rock with electronics — it gives it a special charm, in my opinion. I often add a kind of “trailer” or “soundtrack” feel. This likely stems from the fact that my development as a composer was heavily influenced by writing music for games. In Genesis, I preserved the main motifs of the tracks but replaced the “usual” rock arrangement with noticeably more synthetic instruments, including electronic drums. This helped create an atmosphere of cyberpunk — perhaps of a distant future. At the same time, it’s not devoid of mysticism and an “alarmingly determined mood,” as one respected YouTube listener noted. I think he hit the nail on the head: it turned out to be a kind of dark synthwave with a touch of epicness and cyberpunk.
Anyway, this music is exactly what I wanted to convey with all these composer’s “bells and whistles.” I hope I succeeded. I should note that this release didn’t achieve the expected promotional results, although the label did include it in the editorial playlist “Electro without brakes” on VK Music.
2023: I began work on the sixth full‑length album, Apostasy. Due to a lack of funds for a professional sound engineer (the label didn’t provide such support), I spent a lot of time on self‑mixing and mastering — but the results could not be called professional.
I had planned to release three singles first, then the album. The first single, Dawn of Sunset, was perhaps the most challenging to realize in the entire history of not only Ships Fly Up but also my musical career. I thought it was going to kill me — it was that hard. I reworked the track’s sound many times, literally without sleeping for days.
Additionally, I learned that the label had no plans to promote my music — their focus had shifted to a completely different genre (very popular with teenagers). As a result, I hastily canceled the release and began seeking to terminate the contract, as the whole point of cooperation was lost. This process took about two years.
In the second half of 2023, I finally secured the funding needed for the album and invited a new sound engineer, Maxim Larikov from Novosibirsk. After completing the work, I released three singles one after another over several months: Dawn of Sunset, Only Lovers Left, and Apostate. Then, as a logical culmination, the album Apostasy was released on May 31, 2024.
By this point, I no longer considered Rhymes Music as my publisher. After analysis, I chose Mediadice (formerly Amphibians Records) as my distributor. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize at the time what a mistake I’d made by partnering with this company. Working with them turned into constant release issues and total disregard for my requests to resolve them, along with long‑term non‑payment of royalties. (You can read more about the full story in my posts on VK or Telegram.) Only after I made this situation public did it finally come to an end — namely, my early departure from the company.
2024 marked the end of collaboration with Rhymes Music. We reached an agreement and terminated the contract by mutual consent. As a result, all Ships Fly Up releases published before 2024 became available to me again. To prevent them from disappearing from streaming platforms, I began looking for a new distributor — Yourtunes became it.
2025 was the year Ships Fly Up saw a noticeable jump in popularity on Yandex Music: over 80 000 monthly listeners and more than 22 500 subscribers, exceeding 1.7 million listens per year. I assume one reason was the departure from Mediadice. As a result, the project was listed among the 15 most popular post‑rock artists on the platform.
Another feature of this period was that some Ships Fly Up tracks began being played in public spaces across dozens of cities in Russia and some locations in Kazakhstan. These included shopping malls, cafes, restaurants, barbershops, shops, and more.
For example, in the summer of 2025, there were over 5 000 reproductions across 473 locations.
That same year, the track Catch the Moment became the musical accompaniment in the official trailer of the search and rescue team LizaAlert, dedicated to its 14th anniversary. The trailer has already collected more than 300 thousand views.
I also had the experience of composing soundtracks for Malaysian short horror films in 2016 (more on this in a separate article). Then, in 2017, I was fortunate enough to be one of the composers for the Russian short film Latte, directed by Anton Levkovsky. The film featured the following actors:
- Artur Sopelnik (known for Fizruk, Ranetki, Cadetstvo);
- Daniil Dubinin (known for Interny, Sled, Papiny Dochki, Kulagin and Partners);
- Kristina Bekanova (known for The Method).
Between 2016 and 2017 — much like during 2010–2011 — I entered a new major phase marked by deep philosophical re‑evaluations. One day, while walking down the street, I lamented to myself that there was no music in the world that I liked 100 % myself. This seemingly simple reason grew into a huge part of my life.
I came up with the idea of creating my own musical project. This is how Ships Fly Up was born. In it, I combined my soundtrack experience with my love for experimental atmospheric rock music. It was a union of soul and mind, to use the terms from Transurfing of Reality.
Incidentally, that also played a role: one of the tracks from the debut album Journey to Ranucan, symbolically titled The Way of the Heart, became the musical accompaniment for the official teaser of Live Broadcast with Tufti, supported by writer Vadim Zeland. Notably, the entire event was set to my tracks, which Tufti personally selected.
In 2012, I had the opportunity to meet an extraordinary person — the traveller and Earth‑mystery researcher Andrey Yuryevich Sklyarov (unfortunately, now deceased). I’ve always been fascinated by the mysteries of history, and, inspired by Andrey’s documentary films, I offered to compose a soundtrack for his future projects. He agreed.
As a result, I became one of the composers for a two‑part film based on an expedition to Greece. The film garnered over a million views on YouTube and became part of the famous series Forbidden Topics of History (Part 1, Part 2).
A similar story happened with the large‑scale game CATS: Crash Arena Turbo Stars. The developers, ZeptoLab, used my track in the trailer — which has gained almost half a million views on YouTube:
Not everyone knows this, but I had considerable experience with vegetarianism, veganism, and even raw foodism. In this area, I had the opportunity to collaborate briefly with the renowned naturopathic doctor and author of health improvement methodologies, Mikhail Sovetov.
I composed an opening musical theme for his YouTube channel School of Health with Mikhail Sovetov, which is used in many of his episodes. You can find a mention of me in the official VK community, in this post.
Egor Fedotov, around 2005–2007
Egor Fedotov (left), at the Olimp Club, Samara
Egor Fedotov (guitar and bottle), Podval Rock Bar, Samara
Goodwin and Fedotov, Koma‑Fest, 2009
Egor Fedotov (left), at Koma‑Fest, 2009
«Latte» (still from the credits)
«Latte» (still from the film)
«Traces of Greek Gods» (image from the credits)
In January 2026, the number of monthly listeners for Ships Fly Up on Yandex Music exceeded 100 000 for the first time.
Egor Fedotov is a composer and the creator of the instrumental music project Ships Fly Up.
His work combines elements of post-rock, metal and electronic music, forming cinematic soundscapes that explore inner conflict, transformation and the drive to move forward.
His musical journey began long before Ships Fly Up — with early experiments, commercial work and composing for various media projects, including trailers and soundtracks. These experiences shaped both his sound and his approach to music as something more than entertainment.
At a certain point, the focus shifted.
Instead of creating music for external projects, the direction turned inward — towards something more personal and honest. This shift led to the creation of Ships Fly Up in 2017.
What started as a solo project gradually evolved into a fully сформированный artistic world, with multiple albums, a distinct visual identity and a growing international audience.
Today, Ships Fly Up is not just a music project, but a space where sound becomes a tool for reflection, resilience and movement forward.
The journey continues.