Five Easy Masterpieces: an introduction to Eastern Bloc bands
Ever since the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union‘s subsequent dissolution in 1991, a perception of the Eastern Bloc as an unremitting grey sea of ‘khrushchevka’ apartments and enervating edifices of authority can often evoke a crude and misleading perception of the region’s communist states as bereft of art and popular music, a cultural vacuum keenly written by a triumphalist West eager to shape a ‘victor’s history’ of The Cold War.
Ever since Beatlemania’s “capitalist pollution” crept into the Eastern Bloc in the early 1960s, pockets of inspired musicians sought to defy the authorities, grow their hair, and immerse themselves in the Western decadence at the expense of their easy social mobility up the communist system. Punk, new wave, and rock ‘n roll all made their way to the East, whether performed in a direct challenge to their respective regimes or played within approved ‘Vocal and Instrumental Ensembles’, an attempt to satisfy the demand for pop and rock without any of its social challenges.
The lengths the USSR and its satellite states went in suppressing popular music’s reach shouldn’t be minimised. When long hair was enough to be harassed by the Militsaya police, the suffocating censorship and bureaucratic inconsistencies in granting permission to a performance one minute and arbitrarily withdrawing approval the next created an impossible climate for any young artist. Then there was the infiltration. As revealed after the fall of Germany’s wall, the internal Stasi security’s profiling and informant strategy dealt a devastating blow to many East German punks in the 1980s, bandmembers discovered to have been informers to save their careers or reputations in a state that could ‘disintegrate’ one’s social standing at will.
Music found its way, however. In and out of state label control, such as the Soviet’s Melodiya label, disco was considered harmless enough, keeping young communist citizens contained and managed on one dancefloor, and Melodiya reluctantly issued various Beatles LPs. While Cliff Richard set a precedent as the first major international star to play the USSR in 1976 coupled with the country’s first rock festival taking place in Georgian SSR’s Tbilisi in 1980, the Perestroika era ushered by Mikhail Gorbachev saw a string of major gigs with the world’s biggest stars including Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel, and an explosion of domestic acts that even reached MTV, such as Russian glam-metal group Gorky Park.
With contemporary pop less far away than the Iron Curtain dared to admit, let’s look at five essential picks of Eastern Bloc’s literal musical barrier breakers.
Five essential Eastern Bloc bands:
Laibach
Formed during the dying days of Tito and Yugoslavia’s slow lurch to internal collapse, the Slovenian industrial group Laibach pursued a radical approach to politically charged theatre and subversive multi-media stunts that cut an uncompromising reputation for challenging subversion of the state and its Yugoslav People’s Army, often resulting in their art happenings’ abrupt cancellation by the local authorities in their Trbovlje hometown.
Achieving greater fame after moving to the UK and signing with Mute Records, Laibach released a string of sly, deconstructionist pop takedowns, including Opus Dei and a full-album cover of The Beatles’ ‘Let It Be’. Their neoclassical irony was lost, however, on North Korea’s national censors, who nevertheless permitted them to perform in Pyongyang—making them the first foreign national group ever to do so. Yet, it is Laibach’s self-titled 1985 debut that still serves as the blueprint for their martial exploration of ideological dogma—an industrial march of drum-machine muscle and militaristic samples that continues to bristle with dissident energy.
Kino
Formed in Leningrad in 1981 and centred around frontman and songwriter Viktor Tsoi, Kino borrowed from post-punk’s taut minimalism pioneered by Joy Division and The Cure, crafting a terse, lo-fi interpretation of new wave with an added wistful melancholy that struck a chord with disaffected Soviet teens.
As Glasnost freed up Kino’s artistic hinterlands, 1988’s Группа крови articulated a new wave of hope and unshackled political and cultural expression, featuring several liberatory songs that would serve as unofficial anthems to the Eastern Bloc’s collapse the following year. Tsoi tragically died in a car crash in 1990, and the outpouring of grief that struck Russia compared to Kurt Cobain’s loss to a generation of music fans. In Moscow, Russian music lovers to this day make the pilgrimage to the ‘Tsoi Wall’ on Arbat Street, where fans leave messages honouring the late artist, as well as visiting the boiler room where he once worked.
Siekiera
Puławy punk band Siekiera, Polish for ‘Axe’ and originally operating under the name Trafo, is generally credited as the defining band to play at 1984’s Jarocin Festival. Inspired by Killing Joke‘s industrial gravitas, Siekiera blasted brittle cuts of caustic post-punk spiked with dramatic stir, setting them apart from their peers indebted to UK Subs or The Exploited. Playing their first show in Warsaw’s Remont club, Siekiera’s gleeful lyrical profanity made an impression in the environment where such language had deeper subversive dimensions in the communist society.
Happy to challenge punk orthodoxies, the added new wave keyboard flourishes rankled the dogmatic crowd at the next Jarocin Festival appearance. 1986’s Nowa Aleksandria, their sole album, is a creatively ambitious document of Polish punk, Siekiera reaching for immersive textures and atmospheric synths among the combative sonic attack and audaciously striding toward a coldwave sound just as they were cementing themselves as Poland’s premier punk band.
NSRD
Long confined as a footnote in experimental music, Latvian SSR art collective Nebijušu Sajūtu Restaurēšanas Darbnīca (Latvian for Workshop for the Restoration of Unfelt Feelings) produced various works in installations, literature, performance, and video art involving nebulous exchange of members but largely headed by architects and DJs Hārdijs Lediņš and Juris Boiko.
NSRD crafted experimental cuts of minimal-synthpop coated in tape collages and musique concrète utterly at odds with traditional Baltic music. They also created digital pieces of glossy soundscapes serving as soundtracks to their Dr. Eneser’s Binocular Dance Classes installation piece exploring “a contemplative rhythm of life” that feels like a predecessor to Warp Records’ 1990s output. NSRD’s studio experiments remained out of print for years, archived on tape reels until their fascinating work was collated and reissued by STROOM.tv in the late 2010s and poured over by a new generation of Latvian art students.
Cамцы Дронта
Exposed to the wave of ethereal shoegaze and goth conjured by Clan of Xymox and Cocteau Twins, Izhevsk’s Самцы Дронта formed during the USSR’s teetering collapse and initially dabbled in evocative collages of feedback noise swirling around Anna Lebedeva’s cooing vocals. ‘Белый Ребёнок’ illustrates the early darkwave skulk, a nocturnal bass grooves along against foggy keys and warped media samples that channel a nation in flux, and a dash of industrial is reached for on the spiky ‘Кассандра’.
As the Soviet flag was lowered for the last time and Russia entered a new and uncertain future, Самцы Дронта delved deeper into the recesses of dream pop. Aided by a distinctive video involving flying night time motorbikes and a disembodied dear’s head, their defining cut ‘Сумерки’ showed Самцы Дронт at their most evocative, a thrilling soar of strings and Lynchian twang guitar that channels hope and trepidation all at once.
