Good day ladies and gentlemen, take a seat as I tell you a brief story.
Earlier on, I was at a loss as to what specific topic this blog should be on. Of course new music is arriving all the time and it's not as if we're in some kind of creative drought. Oh no! I was just undecided.
Anyways, I was listening to Nero's Minimix for Radio 1. And I recognised a piece I had not heard for all manner of ages. Chemical Brothers did a song 'Star Guitar' for the album 'Come With Us' which was then in turn re-made by Japanese DJ Shinichi Owasa for his album 'The One' and what Nero was playing was the Brookes Brother's remix of 'Star Guitar'.
Anyways, I was then planning on focusing this piece on dance music coming in the East, Russia and Japan and the like. But I got absorbed into Russian dance music and that is the single focus of this article. Russian modern dance music.
Enjoy!
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Here is your average Russian DJ enjoying some flowers:
To be fair, I've mostly found that Russian music that I've been aware of (i.e after the collapse of the USSR) was dance music or lesbian pop acts. I wonder how many more readers clicked on that second link?
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Anyway, Russian dance music has an interesting and varied history. Obviously when people think of the most recent well know dance acts, they're usually coming from France (Daft Punk, Justice), The Scandinavian countries (Swedish House Mafia), the UK, USA, increasingly more from the Middle East with acts like Infected Mushroom from Israel for example.
As it turns out, dance music in Russia is quite underdeveloped and instead of hitting the mainstream alongside Russian pop and rock acts, it is traditionally only played on internet radio sites and shared through websites in mixes but to be honest, a lot of Russian dance music is much 'darker' than a lot of it's Western counterparts. There are possibly several reasons for that, one being that colder countries certainly appear to have larger underground movements of extreme genres, I'm thinking Norwegian's Black Metal and the like.
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So, Russian dance acts that have broken through and become bigger in the Western countries are not as dark and extreme as some of their peers. The first main international hit for a Russian song was PPK's 'Resurrection'. That song was so long ago, it's how I learned to spell Resurrection. That's a long time ago. Still, even alongside other big dance hits of the time, 'Sandstorm', 'If This Ain't Love' and so on, 'Resurrection' is still quite a cold song, almost emotionless. Damn good song but somehow distant.
Anyways, as I was saying, a lot of contemporary Russian dance music is 1) fairly dark in tone and nature and 2) banished more to the internet and blogs and forums instead of broadcast on radio stations. However, you searching hard enough, you start finding gems, absolute musical gems. Most of it is either in the genres of 'Psy-trance', 'Dark Psy-trance' or 'dubstep'.
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For example, in the 'psy-trance' end of the spectrum you have artists such as Kindzadza, Moscow residing DJ whose name is taken from a popular Russian film 'Kin-dza-dza'. He has released a fair amount of music by himself, such as the excellent 'Purple Eye' with it's quite quiet, nearly acoustic moments among the track and 'Fishbone', which sounds as if it was taken off an evil late 90s 'Goa Trance' album. Specifically, 'Fishbone' sounds like an evil brother of 'The World of the Acid Dealer', the brilliant 1996 track by The Infinity Project. He also works in partnerships with other Russian DJs under other names (a la Swedish House Mafia), for example, his partnership with another musician is called Osom, playing music in a similar vein as Kindzadza but still very good, as in the song 'Burg Sturz'.
Heading for DJs now and we come across such acts as DJ Smash (not to be confused with the American DJ, DJ Smash) who released such tunes as 'Moscow Never Sleeps', a curiously marching timed piece complete with Sisters of Mercy style backing vocals uttering 'Moscow Never Sleeps' like the words were some mantra. The song itself is surprisingly modern, a vocal trance piece that could've been made by Tiesto during his early years. Very toe tapping and actually pretty good after a while.
There's DJ Grad. Well known for touring clubs in Moscow and currently one of the biggest DJs in Russia.
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There are also acoustic dubstep groups. This may sound like a bizarre combination but in the case of Dubstepler, it really actually works quite well. A bizarre mix of styles and genres to form an electronic music style but performed live, by a band, called Dubstepler. I am reminded of Pendulum playing live when I see their video for 'Jump On'.
Dubstep is very known in underground Russian music circles and so it seems to be that Russian dubstep is a comparatively big affair, with two/three hour long mixes containing nothing but the finest Russian dubstep all by Russian artists. Head on over to this Russian dubstep producer 'Renton's' website (may have to let Google translate it for you) where he's put up all his mixes and damn, they're good.
Like very good.
Very very good.
Some are mixes of both Western and Russian dubstep. So his 'Hero in Dubstep' mix contains music from Skream and Emalkay. It's his 'Behind the Frontline' volumes 1 - 4 that are most impressive though, especially 4. Renton has obviously honed his styled over 1, 2 and 3 and it's really showing on volume 4.
Here's a link to it, because it is that good. Renton's 'Behind the Frontline 4'.
And if you don't like it?
Hey. At least he had the good graces to put on boxing gloves.
Which he probably keeps next to his DJ decks.
I hope you've enjoyed this brief cruise over modern Russian dance music. To be honest, I doubt I've scratched the surface at all but it just goes to show that there are large and popular musical forms growing all over the the world independent of our influences.
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Thank you and goodnight! (always wanted to say that)
Anyways, because I am like Santa Claus, here is a little gift.
You can stick it in your stockings.
'Baby It's You' by Smith. Just for something completely different.
