It was a time full of adrenaline and rapid changes.

The second half of the ’80s. This was a decade marked by the rise in tension between the American and Russian blocks in the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall. Thirty years have passed since the historical events which dramatically changed the cultural scene of the Soviet Union forever.

A team of filmmakers decided to carry out their own investigation into the change that was started by one man: Indulis Bilzens. He stood by the birth of rave culture in Germany and successfully has brought it on the other side of Iron Curtain in the second half of the ’80s.

Techno first appeared in the Baltics in 1986.

Bilzens was born in Riga in 1940, in the last year of the first independent Latvian Republic. In this year happened the first Soviet invasion, and his father was deported to Siberia. Between 1941 and 44 the country was occupied by the Germans. His mother fled the country with him into West Germany because of the second Soviet invasion in 1944.

Bilzens studied English in Cambridge – and was involved in the British peace movement -, medical informatics in Bonn and Stuttgart, and electronic composition at the University of Düsseldorf. Worked for a number of German newspapers and organized avant-garde music events and exhibitions. He began to visit his homeland in the late ’70s (then part of Communist Russian Empire i.e. the Soviet Union).

His friendship with the German DJ Maximilian Lenz (WestBam) led to an interest in the new electronic music coming out of the US. He was involved in the founding of Low Spirit label, Love Parade, and Mayday parties. Bilzens and Lenz made repeated visits to Riga in the late ’80s, introducing DJ culture.

ERA OF DANCE

a film about the first techno beats in the USSR.

More videos from the film.

A long article about the movie on Deep Baltic

Inauguration song by traditional blues-punk duo BASSHOLES

All Bandcamp donations will go to the American Civil Liberties Union or to legal defense for protesters arrested on Jan. 20.

but We The State

„We must not forget anything. We must know our history, know it as it really is, draw lessons from it and always remember those who created the Russian state, championed its dignity and made it a great, powerful and mighty state.

We shall preserve that memory, and we shall preserve that tradition through the ages. We shall hand down to our descendants all that is best in our history – all that is best.

Esteemed citizens of Russia, we believe in our strength, in our ability to really transform and transfigure the country. We have common goals.

We want our Russia to be a free, prosperous, rich, strong and civilized country, a country of which its citizens are proud and which is respected in the world.  (…)

We believe you. We are counting on you. Don’t deceive us. I can assure you that in my work I will be guided only by the interests of the state but there may well be mistakes. But I can promise you, and indeed I do promise, you that I will work openly and honestly.

I consider it my sacred duty to unite the people of Russia and to gather citizens around the clearly-defined tasks and aims and to remember, every minute of every day, that we are one nation and we are one people. We have one common destiny.”

Putin’s inauguration speech as president, 2000

American musician RANDY NEWMAN who – besides his score music: Ragtime, A Bug’s Life, Toy Story, Cars and more – famous his satirical songs too. Now he sings a song about the great leader of Russia in the style of Kurt Weil

„I hope all of you like it. I know he will” – said Newton. I am sure, but in the scene of football fanatics there are Hungarian flags. Not a big problem, because they are almost the same ones. Anyway

„He can drive his giant tractor
Across the Trans-Siberian plain
He can power a nuclear reactor
With the left side of his brain
And when he takes his shirt off
He drives the ladies crazy
When he takes his shirt off
Makes me wanna be a lady.”

You find the full lyrics here.

The song has been taken from his next album will be released sometime next year. But you can get the song:

MP3/FLAC/HD: http://smarturl.it/Putin.Ns
iTunes: http://smarturl.it/Putin.iT

Russian band uSSSy originally played noise-rock with elements of blues, techno and black-metal. By the third album of the band they became a drum’n’guitar duo, and development of the band went in the direction of Middle Eastern music. The unique sound of the band is the result of use of a specially modified baritone guitar, which were mounted additional quarter-tone frets, just as those made by Middle Eastern instruments. In 2014 Artem has left the band. Pavel continuous to play by his own as Holy Palms.

A digital compilation album out now by Aussie label Tenzenmen: noise-rock with elements of blues, techno and black-metal and Middle Eastern tunes. Frenetic

All uSSSy albums

“I guess there’s quite a dark side to me. It always comes out when I’m writing songs. I love Sylvia Plath, and I love listening to songs that have that haunting darkness that really pulls you in, so it’s probably something that I want to create in my songs.” She plays every instrument on her recordings, from bass to piano, from guitar to sitar. Strange bitter-sweet haunted folky pop songs or “grungy abstract folk with a playful darkness” by Marika Hackman

We Slept At Last album on Universal Music

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Seductive brooding jazz with an electronic twist. Baritone sax, double bass, drums, samplers and a whole lot of stomp boxes and effects.  Cozy melancholic cocoon in the midst of a looming, cold, unwelcoming metropolis of Moscow. Eight stories told by different people in different places. For a rainy evening and a bottle of vodka.

Fogh Depot debut album on Denovali Records (Germany)

1986, Pushkin (a town near Saint-Peterburg, Russia): engineer undergraduates have formed a band in order to show the dramatic situations of the everyday life in idiotic manner, and the idiotic situations in too dramatic mode, and it has been named NOM. Now here is a video by the legendary and fabulous group

I Can Control Myself

from their new album Семеро Смертных

Trivia: the man with beard Alexander Liver is a singer of the Grand Théâtre de Genève.

Not many people can front a rock band, sing Górecki’s Third Symphony, lead a marching band processional down the streets of the Sundance film festival and perform in a baroque opera of their own composing — all in a month’s time. But Shara Worden can. She came from a musical family of traveling evangelists, went on to study operatic voice and then classical composition not only in the States, but also in Moscow, where she made her first records. Since 2006 she has been making art pop records under the name of My Brightest Diamond. And there were many collaborations with such artists as Laurie Anderson, David Byrne & Fat Boy Slim, Sufjah Stevens, Prefuse 73, Recoil, Bon Iver, The Blind Boys of Alabama and more.

„This Is My Hand” album on LP,CD, digital on Asthmatic Kitty (US)

She also in a very famous artist Matthew Barney’s brand new cine-opera, the „River of Fundament„, together with Salman Rushdie, Mike Tyson, Debbie Harry and Zeena Parkins, but it’s „such a mess that I sincerely hope I will never have to endure a second viewing” – wrote a critic.

The beauty of it is that she was born in El Dorado

Euro tour in Oct

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Classic industrial techno disco tracks taken from the split LP of STATIQBLOOM and ZEX MODEL

STATIQBLOOM is the German born Fade Kainer from New York. He has industrial metal background (Batillus, Inswarm, Theologian), member in tour band of Jarboe (Swans). ZEX MODEL is a project of Paul von Aphid from Russia, Kaliningrad (aka Königsberg, East-Prussia). It’s dedicated to mutant sounds of 80’s WaxTrax and Nettwerk Records. The split will be released later this month on Desire Records (France)

Hot.Cool.Yours.

Pussy Riot – Putin will teach you how to love the motherland

They are showing progress in music.

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Tovább / Read more »

Отстой is from Saint Petersburg, Russia and as far as it seems it’s only one guy doing druggy psych music in a garage, or a bedroom…or on the bathroom floor, it’s quite hard to tell. He definitely gains inspiration from the average noisy US-influenced garage revival bands but he adds his own under-the-influence Eastern vision and as a result you get the kind of music Kevin Failure would lick all his fingernails from tip to toe (thanks to DrugPunk blog for introducing Отстой to me, by the way).

I had the strange feeling while listening to Отстой’s EP that the first track even has some influences from hispanic RNR, then we go on with a bit of neo-psychedelia but the spirit of Russian punk god (and the father of  shitty-fuzzy guitar sound) Yegor Letov is constantly with us – crazy, isn’t it!? The Russian punk scene seems to have a fucking great time with bands like Sonic death, Wavepool Abortion who take Western music and just spit it against the wall – if you lack the originality in American music, Russian punks are your way too!

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