Who would listen to a release which name literally means "Faggot"? Well, I did, and it turned out to be not bad at all. Actually, "PIDØR" was a name of a craft beer brand produced by some Russian immigrant in Norway initially as a joke:
The combination of an infamous homophobic slur with the slogan "You are what you drink" turned out to be surprisingly successful, although the author decided to close the project before the joke becomes stale. As for this EP, I decided to give it a listen because of the name, but it turned out to be at least as interesting as "Inside the Monolith" by TTMTD.
It's described by the band as "our new and completely spontaneuos release recorded by three completely different people in one room during a single week; we don't known if it's a manifesto or a parable, all we know that it's PIDØR". Those "three completely different people" are Gleb Filonskiy (vocal, bass, programming), Anton 'Dirge' Moiseev (synths, programming) and Roman Yurtaev (guitars). Black Ash was founded as a solo project in 2012 by Gleb Filonskiy in Volgograd, and now they're a full band based in St. Petersburg:
A powerful contender for the title of "the best bandname ever", Armageddon Dildos were formed in late 80s (various source state different years of formation, from 1986 to 1990) and became one of the best known old school EBM bands signed to Zoth Ommog Records in early 90s. This album, however, has a much more "modern" kind of sound, and in my opinion, it's the best one in their discography. I found out about it because of a review in the Vibrations of Doom zine, and it caught my attention because of the unusual name of the band (which turned out to be a slang name for nuclear warheads). After checking it out, I wasn't disappointed at all, especially by the tracks like "Götter Der Nacht" and "Traurige Nation". Some (but not many) of tracks on "Morgengrauen" have female vocals. AD apparently don't have a Bandcamp page, and almost all the download links for "Morgengrauen" seem to be dead, but this one seems to be working by now.
Even if the public interest in gothic and industrial scenes is on the sharp decline during the 2010s (at least here), DBS continue to actively perform live, and their new album is perhaps the best in their discography. Of course their trademark humour is very much present on there. On "Orthodox Imperialist", Herr Major is coming to America and even manages to solve the mystery of Donald Trump's ancestry. The parody of Sepultura's "Roots Bloody Roots" is also remarkable (and it's not the first time DBS are doing something like that: they have released a cover EP of black metal classics in 2008). And if you don't want to pay €5 to Bandcamp, the whole album is officially available as a free download here.
DBS stands for "Deutsche Berittene Spetsnaz" or "German Mounted Special Forces", and from the name alone you can guess that they doesn't take themselves too seriously. I'd call them a Russian answer to Hanzel & Gretyl if not for the fact that their music is much more influenced by old school EBM rather than NDH. Actually, DBS along with their side project Strong Product are among the very few projects that have played old school EBM in ex-USSR. DBS themselves prefer to call their style "bodybilly", since they mix the sound of Electronic Body Music with the punk attitude and the aesthetics of rockabilly and psychobilly.
Most releases of DBS are conceptual works telling the story of "Herr Major", a fictional character that's the mascot of DBS (much like Eddie is the mascot of Iron Maiden, for example). This particular album tells us about the adventures of Herr Major during the years of Russian Revolution/Civil War and the New Economic Policy. Malevich's Suprematism, 20's cabaret and operetta, cocaine and morphine - "Suprematismus" mentions everything about the culture of early XX century that later influenced the early industrial scene. The militaristic attitude typical for early EBM is also on there, but presented in a rather comical way.
Veprisuicida is another moniker of Alexander Lebedev-Frontov, the very first industrial musician in USSR/Russia, better known for Linija Mass. All Lebedev-Frontov's projects are aimed to be industrial music in its pure form, deeply rooted in the avant-garde art of of the early XX century (Italian and Russian futurism, Swiss and French dadaism and "musique concrete", and early Soviet avant-garde music like A. Avraamov's "Symphony of Factory Sirens"). I completely agree that the history and aesthetics of the first half of XX century were a massive source of inspiration for many industrial / noise projects, and while this album (or anything else by Lebedev-Frontov) isn't something to listen to on a regular basis, it wasn't supposed to be an easy or pleasant listen anyway:
The project was named after an avant-garde short movie made in 1988. The author defined its genre as "necrorealism" and claimed it to be a critique of militarism (although I'm sure it was just an attempt to make it more acceptable to the Soviet establishment of the time). It's only 4 minutes long, so you may just watch it and decide by yourself if its plot makes any sense:
It should be also noted that the same name was used for a fake band that was claimed to be the first to play heavy metal in the USSR (as early as in 1976). In fact, both "their" music and the photos (apparently chosen for the funny looks of the musicians) belonged to a late 80s obscure metal band from the Belorussian SSR:
This album, consisting of 4 untitled tracks, was apparently created with a purpose to demonstrate that Soviet military marches mix quite well with martial industrial and rhythmic noise. Nothing is known about the band member(s), so there's not much to say, yet for some reason I'm sure they aren't newcomers to the genre. The music itself ranges from dark ambient to pretty harsh rhythmic noise, with a lot of samples from WWII speeches and marches. This album is comparable to Pyongyang Hardcore Resistance's "Corea" in both sound and aesthetics, and the mystery surrounding the project. Won't recommend it to anyone who isn't a big fan of rhythmic noise, but if you're searching for something in the vein of PHC and TPROE, but with more focus on the WWII era Soviet art and propaganda, check it out.
Title translation: The Rolling Mill - Nürnberg (Nuremberg). Discogs say it was released on archive.org under Creative Commons license, but I can't find it anywhere on archive.org (if you can, please tell me). However, you can listen to it here or on YouTube.
Genre: Darkwave, Ethnic Electronica, New Age, Trip-Hop
Country: Russia
Release date: 2015
Track List:
Umbraya Erze
Vetvi
Salameika
Kukushka
Aion
Niti
Veter (feat. Namgar)
Yaard
Beliy Gorod
Kolodec
The best known Russian ethnic electronica band which most likely was a major source of inspiration for projects like Lovozero. Theodor Bastard started in the second half of 90s inititally as an experimental industrial/noise project in the vein of Coil and Nurse With Wound, and the later album "BossaNova_Trip" (2001) at times sounds surprisingly similar to much later works by Access To Arasaka. By 2004, Theodor Bastard became a full band and radically changed their sound in favour of darkwave and neofolk, which brought them worldwide recognition. During the second half of 2000s, they actively toured Europe and have shared the scene with such high profile bands as Nine Inch Nails, Spiritual Front and Von Thronstahl.
"Vetvi" is their latest up to date LP, strongly inspired by the atmosphere of Russian North, especially Karelia. The album name is a reference to the branches of the mythological World Tree (Arbor mundi). Another prominent lyrical topic on "Vetvi" is the theme of death (especially of the loved ones). Musically, it's ethereal/darkwave kind of world music, strongly inspired by Dead Can Dance and early Massive Attack, but rooted in the folk tradition of Russian North. The members of Theodor Bastard travel extensively, and draw the inspiration from various folk traditions from Russian North (which is my favourite travel destination as well) to Middle East.
The best song on "Vetvi", in my opinion, is the opening one "Umbraya Erze". It sounds very beautiful, although I have no idea about the language of the lyrics (someone has said they're in Old Norse, but I'm not sure about it at all):
Tikhie Kamni ("Silent Stones", taken from a line from the song "Khibiny") is a collaboration between members of Lovozero and Moa Pillar. Compared to Lovozero, the sound is more minimalistic and ambient-oriented. The tracks are mostly instrumental or with lyrics that fit into a single line. Overall, it isn't as interesting as Lovozero's solo works, but certainly enjoyable, especially because I feel close to the theme of this album:
"A duo of Anastasia Tolchneva (Lovozero) and Fedor Pereverzev (Moa
Pillar) have recorded "Zemli" ("Lands") hiking, making field recordings
and improvising while on the road – and what a soulful ambient record it
is!
No status, no background, no ego, no bullshit. Heartfelt folk vistas
make way for ethereal Cocteau Twins-style cuts, deep drones, aural
accidents and minimalist piano. These songs are sonic diaries of young
people exploring Russia's valleys and hills, rivers and lakes. Not
intended for a release, the personal recordings possess that strange
magic lots of "psychedelic collage" records lack.
Anastasia and Fedor are no strangers to audio-production, though.
Pereverzev's Moa Pillar project is one of the Russian scene's best-kept
secrets – he makes that kind of eerie bass music that's rooted in song
and dipped in power ambient. Tolchneva's solo act Lovozero is a
different beast whatsoever: think beats with digital sheen and Russian
folk song.
Tikhie Kamni is a true gem – quiet, intimate and easy to miss. Music made for no one that can be enjoyed by anyone"
After posting Lovozero on here, I thought it'd wouldn't hurt to post Uutai too. Uutai plays Yakutian khomus, an instrument which for some unknown reason is commonly called "Jew's harp" in English, although it doesn't have anything to do with Jews and traditional Jewish music. There's some confusion about her real name: according to the cover art of this album, it's Olga Podluzhnaya; however, Uutai refers to herself as Olena (an Ukrainian name, although Uutai says she doesn't have Ukrainian roots and doesn't know the language). Anyway, she's a very talented musician whose music certainly should be recorded to anyone who's into Siberian shamanic folk (like the solo works of Veronika Oshulik).
Uutai became widely known after the video of one of her performances ("Siberian shaman lady") went viral on Youtube, and it's well deserved - her performance was amazing, and her vocal abilites (including the ability to imitate animal sounds) are great. Funny enough, a lot of people in the comments say that she has very beautiful armpits - that'd be one of the most original compliments I've heard of :)
After the success of this video, she performed at a lot of shows in various countries, but in come cases her music wasn't met well (understandable, because her style is too weird and exotic for an unexperienced listener). However, her performance on Britain's Got Talent apparently was quite successful:
A quite unusual album consisting mostly of piano melodies mixed with the sounds of nature and whispering spoken word vocals. More than half of the track names are in Estonian (no idea why). The later releases from Kageraw gravitate towards pure piano sound and meditation/yoga music, and the earlier stuff (including this debut album) is more experimental and therefore more in the spirit of my blog. Out of what was posted on here before, I'd compare it to "Slower Structures" by Tamás Kátai - it's just as atmospheric, minimalistic, melancholic and piano-driven, albeit noticeably more lo-fi. According to the release notes, it was recorded at home in Zhukovsky (Moscow region) during the 2012-2013, and finished on the first days of May, 2013 - so, exactly 6 years ago.
Kageraw's real name is Yulia, and she was playing in several punk and metal bands at the time this album was released. Aside from music, she's apparently very interested in photography and visual art in general (judging from her Instagram and other social media), and just like many other female musicians, she's a bit of an amateur model herself. In particular, I really liked this photo of her:
The scenery and composition is amazing, as well as the post-processing. And as a bonus to that, Yulia has quite beautiful legs ;) But let's go back to her music:
This project caught my attention because it's named after one of the biggest lakes in the European part of Russian Arctic and the centre of Kildin Sami culture in Russia. With such a name, it just don't have the right to be bad, and this EP indeed turned out to be pretty interesting.
Lovozero is an alias of Anastasia Tolchneva, who mixes the authentic folk music of the Russian North (the ethnocultural region that I absolutely love) with the ambient/new age electronica - basically, the Northern Russian folk tradition adapted for the modern hipster's taste. According to Anastasia: "It is not about cultural codes. These compositions are my intuitive responses to chaotic life scenarios". The "Zagovory" EP, described as "spells and electrical roundelays", is her most accessible release (at least compared to the subsequient full-length album "Moroka", which is much more experimental). Very beautiful music, just like the nature of the region where that folk tradition comes from. Enjoy:
Oyme is one of the few bands whose news I follow very closely. They're an unique all-female project whose mission is to collect the authentic folk music of Finno-Ugric minorities of Russia (the cultures unfourtunately very few people care about), and to make its modern interpretations. However, this new song and music video is based on the pre-Islamic folklore of the Nakh-Dagestani (more precisely, Avar) people:
The leading voice of Oyme, Ezhevika Spirkina, is a professional ethnomusicologist that's very happy to answer any question about the cultures she studies. Last year she spent quite a lot of time and efforts to gather the obscure musical folklore of rural parts of Dagestan (she met with the members of Inoe, among others), and the first results you can see in the video above. The name of the song and video translates to "Mother of Wind", which is a reference to a pre-Islamic Avar deity.
It should be noted, though, that this work got a lot of flak from both the radical nationalist elements among the Finno-Ugric peoples (which perceived an interest in a non-FU culture, especially a Muslim one, as a betrayal, although being interested in different cultures is a crucially important part of being a good ethnographer), and some strictly religious people in Dagestan which didn't take well the perceived pagan connotations of the video (even if Ezhevika explicitly stated that's now what the video is about). Some of them also didn't like her attire - which is surely un-Islamic, and doesn't need to be (needless to say she's also a model with a very beautiful figure, and she has every right to be proud of it).
The band themselves view the "Horol Ebel" video as a multi-layered work, which is, among other things, a social project that concerns the cultural heritage of humanity transcending the national/ethnic and religious boundaries. The video was filmed in Gamsutl, a historical village in the mountainous rural Dagestan, which is mostly abandoned and ruined by now. Oyme expresses hope for the minor languages to live on, and the heritage monuments like Gamsutl, or Notre-Dame de Paris, or the Dormition Church in Karelia, to be restored.
It's time to post here something by the last major project of Anton Shafarostov aka 121 that wasn't featured on my blog yet. You might know 121 by such projects as Velehentor, Valhalla, Nuclear Winter, or Кобь, or if you can read Russian - by his Twilight Shadows webzine (which, unfortunately, seems to be defunct now). Under the CtE moniker, he released several space ambient/drone albums whose main theme is the insignificance of Earth and the human civilization on the cosmic scale:
"The sound of CLOSING THE ETERNITY is based upon drones, and developed
with ambient and noise touches. The first and the second albums were
written in very misanthropic and materially-minded way. Then 121 made a
pause to conceive the essence of CLOSING THE ETERNITY as a ultimate
abstraction from all human-related aspects… from everything that could
be concerned with terrestrial civilisation"
Like the other projects of 121, CtE sounds quite professional when compared to most other underground music projects in 90's and early 2000s' Russia. Let's be honest: drone ambient is often considered to be quite low effort genre, but this can't be said about CtE, despite the minimalistic composition of the music. According to 121, he became interested in ambient music after he heard "Comala" by Jorge Reyes as a kid in 1986, but he started making his own music only in late 90s. 121 himself describes the sound of "Kosmodrones" as "deeply spatial dark drones with distant and haunting melodic lines". The track titles are taken from a short nihilist poem by Georgy Ivanov, which is one of my favourites too.
121 seems to have completely quit making his own music after the release of the "Ceremonial Death" EP by Velehentor, although he mixed and mastered albums for several black metal bands in the last few years. According to this article (which even mentions my blog, by the way), the maestro was also spotted at a 2013 convention of electronic music composers in California. And yes, he's now a high-ranked official, which isn't a big surprise - after all, prime ministers and even presidents that listen to metal aren't unheard of, and misanthropy is a trait that's certainly expected from a public official, but... Just watch this video. Does that man wearing glasses looks like a black metal musician? Yet he is (or, at least, was):
On Cosmonauts' Day, I'm posting this conceptual work by Massimo Magrini, dedicated to the works of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and their practical applications that ultimately led to the first human spaceflight on April 12, 1961 (the case where you can use the words "rocket science" unironically). Parts of it were recorded in Moscow and St. Petersburg using the old Soviet ANS synthesizers (those were already mentioned on my blog several times in connection to the history of Russian/Soviet synthpop). I'd bet that Massimo's music is better known here than at his home in Italy, partially because of this release too :)
When it comes to sound, "Kosmodrom" doesn't offer many surprises to the fans of Bad Sector. Like Massimo's other releases, it's better described as sound engineering (a field that Massimo possesses a scientific degree in) rather than music, and it's intended to be the modern (post-)industrial music in its pure form. However, you aren't going to hear any harsh noise on there; it's "nerdy" cosmic ambient for the most part, with some occasional elements of rhythmic noise. This 2xCD edition was released by Loki-Found, a German label specialized in dark/cosmic ambient, in 2013, and it's partially available as a free listen on Bandcamp. Of course, you also can download it from dark-world.ru or elsewhere, especially considering that Massimo himself has nothing against musical piracy and admits being a pirate himself :3
Honestly, until today I never thought I'd ever post anything related to Nambavan on here. But today's the 1st of April, so why not? Moreover, this particular album suprisingly fits the spirit of my blog quite well, which can't be said about the rest of Nambavan discography.
Nambavan (pronounced as "number one" with a thick Russian accent) is a moniker of Linar Bilalov, who is also known as an owner of a now defunct site bratan.info (which was pretty much the 2000s equivalent of Life of Boris). He has released several albums of trashy electronic music with offensive lyrics, which would be best described as "unintelligent dance music" (in fact, it sounds more like electroclash than anything else). While there's not much in the discography of Nambavan worth listening to, his cartoonishly anti-intellectual image has became a meme that's still remembered after almost a decade of inactivity. The last.fm biography of Nambavan is worth checking out too:
Using a broken $3 mic, an $80 guitar and an old Casio keyboard,
Nambavan puts together dirty disco tracks that will pizdelovka you on
the dance floor. Time and space traveler Nambavan brings you the nasty
eighties punk pop that the USSR never had, coveting and cultivating
dancefloor rhythms, analogue distortions and droll hip hop references.
At
his home in Kazan, Republic of Tatarstan, where few make their own
music, Nambavan started out by enrolling in a music school to learn the
guitar, but was expelled for not being able to remember songs. He moved
on to the digital world, bought his first PC in 2000 and started
composing.
This album, however, is very different. With its name being an obvious pun on "Last Night The DJ Saved My Life" (and no, "Shooting On The Gay Party" obviously isn't a reference to the Orlando massacre which happened a decade after this track was recorded, although cynical references of this kind are very much in the habit of Nambavan), it's the only entirely instrumental album of Nambavan which offers a pretty interesting mixture of noises, clicks and other experimental sounds. Headphone listening is recommended:
Nambavan’s first album without vocal and electronic melodies, written
down after two weeks of experiments with analog noise, clicks, delays,
highpass house filters and broken groove rhythms.
You will feel how music collapses in your head.
All in all, I haven't expected anything like this from Nambavan, and if you're a fancier of obscure experimental electronic music, it will be a very interesting find for you... or maybe not. But seriously, what would you expect from an album that's literally titled "Last Night The DJ Shaved My Ass"?..
