Contemporary Russian Audio Output

lots of good ambient/electronic coming out of the former USSR.

Domino picked up on Fizzarum, whose music is like the best bits of Arovane, Four Tet, and BoC. Monochrome Plural. you want this.

Shaped Harmonics, based in Moscow and featuring a unique roster of Russian producers, is a must for anyone in love with the golden age of IDM - the Artificial Intelligence heyday of Warp, Rising High, Beyond, Rather Intersting, Source, etc. Ambidextrous - Errorism is the place to start. a new-classic in the making.

Art-Tek has a nice stable of Warp-like/lite acts (Solar X, Mewark, Novel 23, Lazyfish, Alexandroid, EU), many of whom attracted attention via larger labels like Lo Recordings, Neo-Ouija, K20, and Worm Interface.

the Exotica label has put out some rather strange music - sorta hybrid IDM/dub/lounge/electro-acoustic/folk (!) work - by F.R.U.I.T.S., Anton Nikkilä, Volga, Species of Fishes, and other Russian musicians. Ole Lukkøye, who are like Faust, Sunburned Hand of the Man, and a good soundsystem jamming deep in the Carpathian woods, had a disc out on Exotica. that may be a good place to start.

Ole Lukkøye evolved from a Glasnost-era psych/art-rock band, Rainy Season, whose albums are superb - think Pink Floyd sonics with David Sylvian atmosphere.

its all about scsi 9. Anything that Anton Kubikov has done outside of scsi 0.

To me, the art-tek/cheburec rosters are pretty generic. You can find comps. called "Vykhod v Gorod" which one of them puts out. i wanted to be more excited but fizzrum EU, solar x etc than i actually was.

Sop i would just go with any of the russian stuff that the kompakt mafia pick up on. eg, scsi9. they are best. there are some other tech house dudes lurking, like yura moorush.

pop music: zemfira is a (sort of) russian kd lang. her classic tune is "do svidanya"
ruki vverkh are a sort of hi-nrg pop boyband. (maybe it has some girls in it)
alsu is the sophisticated (relatively) pop princess, moving towards an r'n'b sort of vein. she needs some decent producers.
filip kirkorov is awful
alla pugacheva is worse
bad balance are like the godfathers of russain rap. they include detsl, who used to be a teen pin up.

WARNING: russian music contains an abnormally high level of accordian. Everywhere.

a friend who was in Moscow a few months ago bought a comp of current russian summer hits called 'Samie slivki radioefira 2'. there's lots of top disco action on it, much less accordion than you'd expect, some very pretty ballads, and that all-pervasive x-factor that makes it sound so unmistakeably RUSSIAN!

it is utterly excellent, and i have been playing it to death this summer. highlights:

Zhasmin - Samiy lyubimiy
hands down, the loveliest ballad i've heard this year. by anyone.

Sofiya Rotaru - Beliy tanec (remiks)
pop-trance taken to its outermost reaches of poppiness - where it doesn't resemble trance at all anymore, but still retains its sweeping melancholy and stellar drive.

Dyuna & Natal'ya Senchukova - Moy miliy Botanik
jolly knees-up disco romp... featuring an accordion! dead nice chorus. and for no reason whatsoever - a sample of "Back To Mundian Ke" in the middle of it all!

(there's also a very, VERY silly disco number by Andrey Gubin, "Putin - Super Didzhey" where he sings about how mr Putin is a super DJ. sadly i speak no russian, so can't tell what the lyrics are actually about)

Tamizdat.org is a good source of news and CDs from Russia and Middle and Eastern Europe.

I'd say Zemfira is actually really good and I don't think she sounds like k.d. lang at all (ok, I've never heard k.d. lang, but Zemfira's definitely not country at all). Her main weakness is her lyrics, which are crap. But musically, she's pretty impressive.

Nochniye Snaipery are pretty good, sort of Russia's answer to the Indigo Girls.

For a while I was very into Umka i Bronevichok. You can download almost all of her bluesy/folsky albums from www.umka.ru. Her lyrics are great, especially for those studying Russian.

Umka is friends with Olga Arefieva, who has several albums out, my favorite of which is Batakakumba, which is entirely reggae - in Russian!

Auktsyon (www.auktyon.ru/.com in English) is (was?) a great band with four really great albums: 'V Bagdade vsye spokoino', 'Ptitsa', 'Bodun' and 'Zhopa'. They also had an incredible album with a poet named Aleksei Khvostenko on vocals called 'Zhilets vershin'.

Finally, from about 1989-1990, there was a singer named Yanka Diagileva, who, unfortunately, killed herself, but sang really great, extremely depressing songs about the emptiness of Soviet life. Her lyrics are worth learning Russian for.

ok zemfira is nothing like k d lang but she a) is a woman, b) looks a tiny bit liker k d lang, thwerefore i made the comparison.

as ever, you can hear some sort of version of the russian charts here. click the icon at the end of each line for a real audio clip. Zhasmin is there at no. 25 - "kaplya leta - ' a drop of summer?!?!",

hmm. i never really thought about zemfira and k.d. lang, but maybe you're right. btw, i've had much success finding info and, er, "files" at zvuki.ru and for purchases (in no way am i affiliated with them) rbcmp3.com has sold my email address, but never my credit card number (to my knowledge). they're fast, too.

honestly, i think the quality of russian pop/rock has gotten much better in the past few years. compare mummi trol'/zemfira (late 90's) to, say, pugacheva/apina/bulanova (early-mid 90's) and, well, there's really no comparison. a couple months ago, my wife and i borrowed someone's dvd of "russian mtv hits of 2003" or something like that and, while a huge amount of it was crap, there was less than we saw sitting on the couch in moscow watching muz-tv.

I head a russian 2 step version of Vivaldi's Four Seasons once. That was pretty dreadful.

re: places to buiy cds, i managed to get some dvds and a vido from ozon.ru, and that got delivered fast and reliably to the uk. i was blown away...it remains to be seen if some fucker steals all my card info but still. you cn gte cds there too obv.

i've got to say though, i have never seen more absurd band than mummii troll. they are freaking awful!!! if they ditched their singer then that might go some way to reducing their awfulness ( although this could be said for approx. 65% of all russian music), but god...they are rubbish!

re: vivaldi....that; altero's tune! there is a lot fo russian garage up and coming...check (though i've siad this before) Artifact's From Russia with Dubz EP on solo recs. (mattt jam lamonts label). 4x4 bizness....

mummii trol' crap?? maybe from some sort of cheesy bulanovist perspective, but that's a frame of mind i don't often get into. i'll give you this: the guy does have a certain kermit/morrissey quality. still, mostly great tunes (esp. 'morskaya').

mummii troll are crap from my perspective, whatever that is; dont think its a "cheesy bulanovist" one, i have no idea what that is.

jist for me, russian vocals esp male, are always on a knife edge between awful/excruciating, and intriguing/effective. mummii troll fell of the knife for me. whereas i can tolerate the dude from leningrad, like 30% of the time. the women score slightly better, but often just have a realy bizarre quality to them that is alos irritating.

ps this isnt a fact, this is how i perceive it. thnx bye

the mummii troll tune im thinking of in particular is the one where is like mnock french revolution or something.

Zemfira's first, self-titled album was nicely minimal; the more expensive her production gets, the more she sounds like '70s FM.
Mumy Troll are highly idiosyncratic Britpop. The voclas are as polarizing as Robert Smith's.
Auktyon are interesting but practically defunct.
Splean (they insist on this spelling, sorry) are a decent Placebo-like outfit.
Leningrad's last album "Dlya Millionov" is worth checking out. It's basically everything bad about Russian music (chest-beating woe-is-me gypsy vocals, accordions, fake ska, lame raps, Santana licks) in one serving, and it's (intentionally) hilarious.

Interesting Russians in New York: Barbez, Regina Spektor (I guess), Spielerfrau.

Ambrose OTM re: Russian male vocals, they are often awfully affected; it's like there's no middle ground between gruff machismo and mewling androgyny. The only good rock singers ever produced by Russia would be Victor Tsoi (template: Richard Butler) and Vyacheslav Butusov (Dave Gahan).