Biography
Spiridon Shishigin was born on the first August of 1950 in the village of Tabaga in the Megino-Kangalassky District of the Sacha Republic (Yakutia). The renowned smith S. I. Gogolev lived in Tabaga, and almost every family had a Khomus. When he was ten years old, his older brother Alexei gave him a Khomus. As often as he could, he watched and listened to how the babushki played it; right away he learned how to produce the different sounds.
In 1968 he entered the Physics-Mathematics Department of the Yakutsk State University. In his student years he took part in and became a laureate of the festivals of amateurs in the arts “Friendship Days”, in which students gathered from the whole Soviet Union. Taking part in these festivals started his creative concerns in playing the kKhomus; he spent much time in playing the Khomus, in inventing many new techniques, in extracting from this marvelous instrument all sorts of new sounds.
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It was just in those years that he became a prize-winner of the 5th All-Union Festival of Young People and Students; just in those years he met Ivan Alexeyev. Listening to his advice, he stopped being carried away by outwardly attractive sounds and began to play more attention to the substance of his playing, trying to convey through the medium of the khomus one’s emotional state to the listener.
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.