For the first several years the band had worked the club and festival circuit, earned a bona fide cult status in the folk-n-fantasy teenage sub-culture and released an acoustic album Doroga Sna (Дорога Сна, The Road of Dream) featuring the underground hit Gorets (Горец, Highlander) set to the Russian translation of Robert Burns' Highland Harry Back Again.
In 2000, Melnitsa had started work on the feature-length animated film Little Longnose (Карлик Нос) directed by Ilya Maksimov, based on the fairy tale of Wilhelm Hauff.