KLVKVA

The broken and chaotic track “Люди мира” by strange forgotten moscow band “Николай Коперник”. Song released in 1985 on cassette album “Родина” (which was re-released on CD in 2005). Whole album is unexpectebly super fuckin’ awesome and very non-typical for whole soviet music scene. I’d like to write a post in near future about that band & album, so stay tuned!

* Nikolay Kopernik - Lyudi mira

Haha, i’m currently in process of discovering Great Вишня talent, so here is another one song from “Танцы на битом стекле” LP — “Ты не пришла” *. I especially enjoy the lyrics, but after some attempts to write song meaning i decided to share a “spooky” handicraft clip which probably could help you to understand a song’s drama.

Oh yes, the 40 seconds initial period is a caption & theme song of TV show “Музыкальный телефон” (also performed by Вишня).

*Ti ne prishla

Oh, sorry for long calm within KLVKVA. Here is one nice song by Алексей Вишня (Aleksey Vishnya) to clear the air. The song called “Танцы на битом стекле”* and it was released on similar titled LP on “Мелодия” at 1991. I like the way pop music and madness were combined in that tune. Enjoy please!

Вишня is probably one of the key persons in soviet new wave music, so i’ll recur to him in future by all means.

* Tantsi na bitom stekle (Dances on a broken glass)

Weeeell, here is something to cast away your boredom. Today’s band called “ФорумForum” and they were quite popular in 80’s when everyone played synth music and looked like happy gays. Without the exception of this band. These guys also made synthpop/new wave and it seems to be that they were intimate with rainbows, unicorns and stuff (i may lie, but not the picture above). In USSR “Форум” was defined as pop music mostly cause of sugary lyrics and light music, but KLVKVA would help you not to understand honied vocalists speeches and just enjoy the very fun and pretty nice soviet music phenomenon.
If you will like presented songs, you should try “Форум”s first album “Белая ночьBelaya noch’ / White Night” encoded from vinyl and uploaded by someone kind.

As far as i know it was May 2008 time and my band played first concert on clumsy punk-rock related party at terryfing club called “UNDERGROUND” (mostly known to everybody as “TUNNEL”). Nevermind. 

Let skip the all boring details of that event. There was a one brilliant thing amazed me a lot - crust-punk band called “くろしみ -ミゼリー-Kuroshimi -Misery-”. I’d called them “fairly usual obscure d-beat” but… they sang in japanese and used haiku as lyrics. Don’t you think thats rather unusual for Russia? I’d say that’s fuckin’ unbelievable by half!

To tell the truth i don’t know much about their activity. Barring their live in “Underground” Kuroshimi also warmed up japanese band D.S.B. in june 2008 and  possibly it was their last show. So i shut myself up and let you enjoy the track and both present live bootlegs: 2008.05.02 at Underground Club, S.-Petersburg and 2008.06.01 at Belgrad Club, S.-Petersburg (of course if your balls made of pure steel to master that kind of music).

Just one song called “Донна АннаDonna Anna” composed & performed by famous russian musician Сергей КурехинSergey Kuryokhin for “Господин ОформительGospodin Oformitel’ / Mister Designer
Ленфильм, 1989” movie soundtrack. I still didn’t really dig up in his works deeply, but this song is always good for one of these miserable distressing days. I also highly recommend you to watch that movie — as far as i know it was one of the first soviet films imbued with luxurious decadence atmosphere and tight mystical anxiety.

So here it is, the very first post in KLVKVA — a blog about the most strange & obscure russian music. I guess lot of people outside Russia heard something about “Кино” or “Аквариум” for example but it rarely goes deeply. Well, i can say a lot of people in Russia didn’t hear so much local bands — same “Кино” and “Аквариум” + 2-3 popular dinosaur bands.

Well, i never liked russian music much, cause most of local well known bands is actually an ordeal for my ears. There is a special term to guard normal people from this kind of music — “Russian rock”. Term “Russian rock” presupposes an availability of some main components:

• Spirituality — just imagine the drunk kolhoznik Ivan who is reflecting on the Meaning Of Life. That’s it.
• Slovenliness — slovenliness is an anarchy. And its good for a rebel image.
• Lousy (and sometimes hoarse) voice — that means that artist love folks and crave for identify himself with people. You know, homely folks and stuff. So i can draw a conclusion: poor voice=to be closer to The People.
• Enormous Quantity of Using an Acoustic Guitar — that came from bards and taken root for some reason.
• There are much more distinctive features, but ones that indicated above are primary. It are these features which do music crappy.

Let me cite an example:

Well, up to a certain time i thought that most russian rock is something like song mentioned above. And every new band i found out was reaffirmed my apprehension. It goes on until i visited a concert of local band “X-Bat” sometime in 2003/2004. That guys gave hope to me.

They were totally goth at that time and theirs music was too simple, but they were kinda good alive and well.. they have a pretty monotonous melodies. And they were so darkwave. Two songs were especially  sick — “Человек из сна” and “Цветущий сад”. In the sequel they became more psychedelic/ebm-like and neat but i assume that there were no recordings.
Unfortunatelly X-Bat didn’t release anything, so the only available tracks are from some doubtful bootleg which you can grab here. The shit can be found a pain for your ears if you don’t stand pathetic darkwave at all. :D

I surely must say sorry for my poor english. I hope that all my unceasing mistakes would attach a necessary national colour to posts.

Sasha Sup,
at your service

Агата Кристи (Agatha Christie) - Аллергия (Allergiya)
from album “Коварство и любовь (Kovarstvo i Lubov’)” released in 1990