#where is my eastern bloc synth music

[prussianmemes]

everyone posting their spotify wrapped as if they're hot shit. sorry if most of the music you listen to is actually listed on spotify you're a poser. real ones have to rely on youtube music.

[dweemeister]

NOTE: This is the second film released theatrically during the COVID-19 pandemic that I am reviewing – I saw Wonder Woman 1984 at the Regency Theatres Directors Cut Cinema’s drive-in operation in Laguna Niguel, California. Because moviegoing carries risks at this time, please remember to follow health and safety guidelines as outlined by your local, regional, and national health officials.

Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)

It took decades for a female superhero movie to make a lasting cultural impact. The honor fell to Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman (2017) – no matter what you think of it, the film dispelled any perceptions that a female-driven superhero movie could never be a cinematic phenomenon. Jenkins returns, as does Gal Gadot as Diana Prince/Wonder Woman and Chris Pine, in Wonder Woman 1984. This sequel is at its best when not proclaiming to the audience its self-importance – an aspect commonly found in and that plagues the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) – and, unfortunately, its poor screenplay oscillates between a flighty romp and superheroic maximalism. For Patty Jenkins, whose filmography is regrettably small mostly due to the lack of opportunities afforded to women directors, she could not have envisioned Wonder Woman’s success, nor the impossible expectations put upon her to surpass the first film. As it is, WW84 is an entertaining, if troubled sophomore effort.

Seven decades after we saw her in the first film and after a prologue during her childhood on Themyscira, Diana Prince (Gadot; Lilly Aspell as young Diana) is working as a restorationist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. In her off hours, she performs the occasional heroic act as Wonder Woman. One of the newest hires is gemologist Barbara Ann Minerva (Kristen Wiig). Diana and Barbara, from an FBI request, identify a stolen artifact as the Dreamstone – a gem that, according to legend, has the power to grant a person one wish. On accident, Diana wishes for her long-dead lover Steve Trevor (Pine) to come back to life; envious of Diana’s looks and wallowing in self-pity, Barbara off-handedly wishes to be like Diana. Both wishes come true, but in ways profaning the literal meanings of the respective wishes. For Barbara, this means a transformation into one of Wonder Woman’s archnemeses, Cheetah. Elsewhere in D.C., struggling television infomercial pitchman Max Lord (Pedro Pascal) wishes to procure the stone to revive his flagging business.

Robin Wright and Connie Nielsen are barely in the film as Antiope and Hippolyta, respectively. Lynda Carter, who played Diana on the ABC television series Wonder Woman from 1976-1979, has a self-aware moment which will delight fans.

1980s American culture is the nostalgic fixation at this moment in popular culture (with the march of time, each decade seems to be beholden to its own moment of nostalgic media cycles). Think of television shows like Stranger Things; movies like Adventureland (2009) and It (2017). The generation that came of age during Reagan’s America grew up in a time where the veneer of the Soviet-backed Eastern bloc was crumbling from within, and where Reaganomics spurred prevalent materialism and indulgence. Unadulterated greed and desire are in every corner of WW84 – from the terrible attempts at flirting with Diana and Barbara that easily qualifies as harassment, the difficulty in renouncing wishes on the Dreamstone, Max Lord’s inability to balance his business commitments in order to make time for his son, Alistair (Lucian Perez). WW84 captures this consumerist, entitled attitude throughout, and remarks on how corrosive this mindset is. Admittedly, it is simple messaging from the screenwriting team – Jenkins; Geoff Johns (a DC Comics writer and producer for comics, television, and film since 2000); and Dave Callaham (2014’s Godzilla, 2019’s Zombieland: Double Tap) – but they never contradict that central message.

WW84 progresses to its hackneyed, natural conclusion. But along the way, the screenplay is bogged down in the havoc that ensues from fulfilled wishes via the Dreamstone. The film’s impressive, animated start cannot build on its own momentum when – after the fulfillment of Barbara’s wish – it begins to clearly delineate its time between Diana/Steve, Barbara, and Max Lord. In their respective thirds of WW84, each character learns more about their granted wishes and the Dreamstone’s nature. The set-up for each third follows the same process: a monologue dripping with disappointment with their life directions, confusion in discovering their wish becoming true, and the exultation of their wild imagination defying all sense of reality. WW84 cannot help itself slathering on the foreshadowing and the repetitive narrative structure. The screenplay’s sins are compounded by the screenwriters’ inability to properly and consistently define the limitations of the Dreamstone’s powers – leading to expositional dumps occurring in the movie well past their welcome. As morbidly entertaining as watching humanity run amok with half-baked and ill-considered wishes is (credit to whoever choreographed the third act’s mass chaos), WW84’s unpolished storytelling leaves behind a somewhat befuddling mess.

The movie’s relative lightness in its opening two acts, though entertaining, throws away Diana’s characterization of a solitary, somewhat maternal protective figure in favor of a decades-long yearning for Steve. Are we really to believe that she has spent every waking moment since World War I pining – no pun intended – for someone she knew for probably less than a month? Whatever chemistry Gadot (whose performance as Diana remains at a laudable standard) and Pine had in the first film has evaporated into a labored dynamic in WW84, and she is too quickly is prepared to leave behind her life as museum preservationist by day/superhero-if-not-by-night-then-during-non-working-hours for him. Her behavior concerning Steve – and this is not even mentioning the ethically murky fact that Steve’s soul inhabits the body of a male stranger for the entirety of his resurrection – does not square with any notion of human growth, especially as most of the twentieth century has passed Diana by.

Putting aside the amusing transformation of Barbara from a bookish, clumsy gemologist to an unspectacled femme fatale, the emergence of not one, but two, villains weakens the characterizations, motivations, and portrayals of both. Thus, WW84 spends less time sympathizing with Barbara’s status as a social outcast, so too the relationship between Max Lord and his forgiving – at film’s end, at least – son (the only aspect of Lord’s life that exists outside work). The film’s divided attention between Barbara and Max Lord assures that their concluding actions become too cartoonish, depthless. It’s not that I am demanding that WW84 (or any superhero movie) should provide brooding, soliloquizing philosopher-poets for a villain. Far from it, especially when noting what the likes of Christopher Nolan and, more recently (and exasperatingly), Zack Snyder have offered in their interpretations of D.C. Comics characters’ mythos. Instead, Barbara and Max Lord become caricatures, rather than fully realized, flawed individuals who retain strands of their goodness even as their actions plunge them into villainy.

Though lacking a moment matching the brilliance of Wonder Woman’s entrance into No Man’s Land from the first film, WW84 contains its share of pulsating combat scenes. Cheetah’s debut during a confrontation at the White House is crisply edited by Richard Pearson (2004’s The Bourne Supremacy, 2006’s United 93) and shot by Matthew Jensen (Wonder Woman). The fight, unlike so many littering action movies nowadays, makes geometric sense of who is doing what and where. This collaboration of cinematographer and editor reaches its peak with a vehicular fight in Egypt that resembles something out of an Indiana Jones movie (minus the comedy that usually occurs during an Indiana Jones vehicular fight). It is a wonderfully choreographed scene, but one mired in its poor depiction of the Egyptians involved. WW84 concludes with a dud of a fight. This is not because of terrible CGI, or the revelation that their mothers share the same name. Instead, it is the lack of lighting that destroys this moment. The final fight between Wonder Woman and Cheetah is so poorly lit that the combat becomes an amalgam of flailing limbs and incomprehensible movement. Cheetah, who by this point appears as if she wandered off the set of Tom Hooper’s Cats (2019), appears to be nothing more than a ball of spotted fur. It is a disappointing end to an erratic sequel.

Longtime readers know that I have pilloried composer Hans Zimmer again and again for dispensing with melodies and for relying too heavily on ostinatos, electronics, and musical texture on his recent film scores. I’m a simple person with certain biases: as a classically-trained amateur pianist-violinist, I prefer scores that have musical interest within and outside the context of a film (would I enjoy playing this score in an orchestra and listening to it in a concert setting?). The worst of his imitators and colleagues at Remote Control Productions are on a train to my musical shit list.  His score to Wonder Woman 1984 is a rare bright spot (aside from maybe his work in the Kung Fu Panda series) in a decade marked by excess. The film opens with “Themyscira” – a synth-y prelude quoting Wonder Woman’s motif, but one that blossoms into orchestral triumphalism. This cue crescendos from 0:27 to 1:11 on the back of string ostinatos, regal brass, and chorus chanting pianissimo. The orchestra and chorus explode to life at 1:11 in a majestic, ascending melody celebrating the joys of Amazonian life on Themyscira. A hummable, singable melody in a 2020s Hans Zimmer score? Yes! Alongside Wonder Woman’s now-iconic electric cello motif, Zimmer has composed a secondary motif for her beginning at 1:53 in “Themyscira” (and which eclipses the electric cello motif in terms of appearances in the score). Another throwback occurs during the cue “1984”, a jubilant cycling of rhythmic melodies that could easily been in a 1980s film scored by Alan Silvestri, perhaps even younger Zimmer himself. Even when Zimmer is introducing villainous motifs or the motif for the Dreamstone, his contemporary obsession for droning synth is tempered by ostinatos in the strings and winds, rather than ear-splitting percussion.

Zimmer’s love theme for Diana and Steve is “Wish We Had More Time” – and I cannot recall the last time the composer brought forth such affecting romantic music. A languid melody led by strings speaks to Diana’s longing – however one may disapprove of it – in ways reminiscent, but still inferior to, of Italian movie scores during the 1980s and ‘90s (think: Luis Bacalov, Ennio Morricone, Nicola Piovani). One quibble: beginning at 1:13 until 2:12 in “Wish We Had More Time”, the second violin tremolos are much too loud, and are just as audible as the melodies by lower strings, first violins, and winds. Hans Zimmer’s score to WW84 is the most thematically fascinating he has composed over the last decade, and it – not Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, not Inception (2010), and sure as hell not the sonic assault that is Dunkirk (2017) – represents the best of what he can be as a film score composer.

The temptation to elevate the dramatic stakes for sequels is present among all the major Hollywood studios. WW84 is not immune to this temptation, but it, at times, resists it. Its ungainly conclusion and dreadful narrative structure reflect those expectations, but one could not classify it as grimdark, such as almost everything Zack Snyder has directed. This is not a Wonder Woman limping her way through apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic times.  Patty Jenkins’ sequel, however flawed, unironically celebrates its own corniness and absurdity – one cannot say this about the MCU (which does so only via metatextual humor). Many of us can no longer experience for the first time Wonder Woman emerging from the Allied trenches of WWI, but Wonder Woman 1984 provides a vision of superhero movies particular to creator William Moulton Marston, director Patty Jenkins, and Gal Gadot’s portrayal of Diana Prince. It even allows for faint echoes of the Lynda Carter Wonder Woman series that would not have been appropriate in the first film. Flawed though this film is, its approach, after a decade or so of building cinematic universes of dramatic escalations, signifies a refreshing change of pace.

My rating: 6/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. Half-points are always rounded down. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog (as of July 1, 2020, tumblr is not permitting certain posts with links to appear on tag pages, so I cannot provide the URL).

For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, check out the tag of the same name on my blog.

Also in this series: Wonder Woman (2017)

[loadcali890]

Ventura Guitar Serial Number Lookup

Beautiful old vintage Ventura Bruno V14 guitar. Looking at other similar models on e-bay, I GEUSS it to be 60's-70's but I do not know. Serial number is 74725, could be made in Japan but I do not know! This guitar includes chipboard case, has warm aged tone, the vibe of old guitar. Ventura was a brand of stringed instruments imported from Japan by C. Bruno and Company during the 1960s and 1970s. Bruno was bought by Kaman in the early 1980s, after which the brand disappeared. Some of the Ventura guitars were knock-offs of the Martin line, such as the Ventura V-35 appearing similar to the Martin D-35, and the Ventura V. Good luck and happy Ventura hunting! Re: Ventura Guitar 14:51 on Saturday, June 5, 2004. (David Woodson) Posted by Archived posts. I have a 'Bruno' Ventura Classic gut string that I bought from C&S Music in Fort Worth,Texas in 1965-66. It has a nice classic tone but that is all I know about it.

GENERAL VINTAGE GUITAR RESOURCES:

Vintage Guitar Magazine - this is Vintage Guitar 101 and all neophytes are advised to start here. Of course, my favorite part is Michael Wright's 'Different Strummer' column, which covers the history of all those wild, wacky off-brand instruments in elaborate detail. VG has also published several of my own articles over the years, some of which can be found on this site.

The Blue Book - if you're serious about buying and selling used guitars, the Blue Book provides the most detailed pricing, dating and identification info. Much of it is available online for free.

GuitarHQ - a nice all-around mainstream vintage guitar site. All the standard Gibson and Fender type stuff, plus some other interesting odds and ends.

ProjectGuitar.com- where the Internet goes to work on guitars! All about guitar maintenance and repair.

MIMF - the Musical Instrument Makers Forum is a goldmine of information about materials, construction and repair techniques, including a gallery of unique custom built guitars that range from inept to incredible. If you need professional advice about repairing your old guitar, this is the place to ask.

Stewart-McDonald - a good source for replacement guitar parts and repair tools to keep your junker running. Also check out WD and Allparts. I'm not sponsored by or affiliated with these or any other manufacturer or retailer, but I'm often asked to recommend good parts sources.Well, here you go.

Ampage - a nice info source for amp schematics and other guitar electronics.

GuitarElectronics.com - lots of wiring diagrams.

Dr. Duck's Dating Service - an excellent resource, lots of serial numbers for many brands of guitars.

OTHER 'JUNK GUITAR' SITES:

Cheesy Guitars - a true kindred spirit, Meatex Z has created a wonderful site dedicated to all those unplayable Russian and Eastern European guitars. He was also nice enough to give me credit for naming his site and helping him out with information initially. We were originally going to do this project together, but decided that two sites are better than one. Go visit Meatex and tell him Big Beat says 'hi'.

SovietGuitars.com - this cool Russian language page for fans of Soviet era instruments is rapidly becoming an important resource.

Vintaxe.com - an excellent site about some of the lesser known vintage guitars produced in the 60's, 70's, and 80's. Lots of pictures and vintage catalog scans, including some of mine that I have shared with them.

My Rare Guitars - a nice collection of cheesy offbeat axes by a very hip collector and dealer. Vintage Normas, Ekos and Dominos galore, plus some great modern reissues.

Fetish Guitars - a fabulous site about Eko, Wandre, Galanti and other Italian guitars of the 60's. Both visually stunning and very informative, it is an absolute marvel.

Lordbizarre's Electric Guitar & Amp Museum - The name says it all. This collector from Belgium has put some seriously weird axes on display for your viewing pleasure.

Cheap Trashy Weird Old Guitars - cool name, and certainly the right spirit! A small but impressive collection of Egmonds, Wilsons, Musimas and even something called a Horugel.

21 Frets - I just love it when somebody takes totally trashed Hagstroms and Melody Makers and restores them from trash to flash. This site chronicles some really cool restoration projects.

Gudok - a Russian site that showcases 'the weapons of the proletariat', old Soviet guitars such as the Tonika, the Formanta and the Solo-II.

Hendrix Room - a Japanese site with a neat collection of totally off-the-wall 60's guitars with names like Youngtone and Melodier.

Animal Charme - dedicated to all those pointy headstock axes of the 80's, this is the home of the shred and heavy metal guitar!

Pointy Guitars - more 80's pointy guitar madness!

Guitare Collection - A wacky French site that showcases some totally bizarre Euro junk guitars, even including a couple from Russia.

Rockin' Hollowbody Guitars - a great forum for people of the thinline and archtop persuasion. If it's got F-holes, you'll find all about it right here.

Vintage Guitars - this Swedish dealer has a photo gallery with lots of Goyas, Hagstroms, Levins and other oddball Scandinavian beauties.

Vermona - here's a German page about those amps and synths, so familiar to professional Russian musicians of the 70's and 80's. Never mind Fender, Vox and Marshall, everyone behind the Iron curtain knew that the best amps were made by Vermona. This factory also produced the famous Weltmeister accordions and the Ionika electric organ. To many older Russians, 'Ionika' is still synonymous with 'keyboard'. See the old Vermona amps HERE and the original Ionika HERE.

VINTAGE GUITAR INFO BY BRAND:

Ampeg - Vintage Ampeg Scroll Basses Aria - Guitar Gallery Burns - Burns Guitar Museum Carvin - Carvin Museum Danelectro - Danoguitars Egmond - Egmond Guitars Eko - Fetish Guitars, My Rare Guitars Framus - Vintage Framus Futurama - Futurama Story Grazioso - Palka.com Galanti - Fetish Guitars Goya - Goya Guitars Hagstrom - Hagstrom USA, Hagstrom Canada, Hagstrom UK Official Hagstrom Site Harmony - Broadway Music Co., Unofficial Harmony Page, Harmony Thumbs, Hillman Guitars Heartfield - Heartfield Central Hofner - Guitar HQ, Hofner Club Guitars, Vintage Hofner, Hofner Hounds Hopf - Hopf Guitars Hoyer - Hoyer Guitars Ibanez - Ibanez Vintage Page, Vintage Ibanez Museum, Ibanez Vintage, Ibanez Collector's World Jolana - Jolana Info, My Jolana Kramer - Kramer Krazy, Kramermaniaxe, Vintage Kramer Music Man - Unofficial Music Man Guitar Page Ovation - Ovation Fan Club, Ovation Tribute Page Shergold - Shergold Guitars Silvertone - Vintage Silvertone Starfield - Unofficial Starfield Guitar Site Teisco - Teisco Twangers Tel-Ray - Unofficial Tel-Ray Page Tokai - Tokai Registry Univox - Univox Page Vantage - Guitar Gallery Ventura - Unofficial Ventura Guitar Page Vermona - Vermona Vox - Vox Showroom Watkins - Watkins Guitars Westbury - Westbury Guitars Westone - Westone Guitars

Ventura Guitar Serial Number Lookup Serial

MISCELLANEOUS OTHER LINKS:

Guitars.RU - Russia's top guitar community. The place to go for information about Tonikas, Aelitas and other Eastern Bloc guitars. If you speak Russian, you can also hang out on their popular forum and socialize with other Russian guitarists. Even if you don't, many of the regulars do speak English.

Russian Rock Club of America - not really vintage guitar oriented, but these folks are my friends and associates. We keep the flame of the classic Russian rock tradition alive in our new homeland, promote independent Russian rock bands in America, stage concerts, music festivals and other cultural events. If you're a Russian rock musician or fan living in America, you're not alone!

© 2003 - 2008 JunkGuitars.com. All rights reserved.

: I bought this Ventura in 1980 at H & H music in Houston and I was just wondering what it is worth. It has a classical body style, not the dreadnought. The action is low and has an adjustable truss rod. The serial number is 60505 and the model # is V-200B. Does anyone out there have an accurate answer? Thank you for your time and effort in responding to this e-mail inquiry.

Have a great day.I ALSO HAVE A MATCHING PAIR OF V-11 BRUNO & V-15 12 STRING FROM MEMORIAL MUSIC JUST PRIOR TO H & H. THEY TOURED WITH BUFFETT IN 74-78 THROUGH CARIB/PROVO SOUTH & NORTH FLORIDA. NO ONE WILL VALUE THEM @ MORE THAN PURCHASE PRICE. : I bought this Ventura in 1980 at H & H music in Houston and I was just wondering what it is worth.

It has a classical body style, not the dreadnought. The action is low and has an adjustable truss rod. The serial number is 60505 and the model # is V-200B. Does anyone out there have an accurate answer? Thank you for your time and effort in responding to this e-mail inquiry.

Have a great day.I have a Ventura Bruno V-12 I paid $110 for in 1972 at Hauschild's music in Victoria, TX. Don't know if they are still around as the owner was up in years then. I have heard they were made in Japan but I dont know this for sure.

Guitar ID and AppraisalThere are many reasons for determining the precise age of your used guitar. The most important one is probably pricing the instrument appropriately when you’re looking to sell it. Prices for certain vintage models vary by thousands of dollars depending on whether it’s a 1963, for example, or a 1964.

You’ll also need to know exactly what your guitar is worth for insurance purposes.One of the most valuable and often overlooked resources to help you identify and appraise guitars is your local used instrument dealer. It’s so important to establish a working relationship with these folks. While it may be tempting to call every store in the area in order to save a few dollars when you’re shopping for something, developing a loyalty to one or two shops pays off when you need service that goes beyond a simple purchase.

While most shops charge a fee for an official appraisal, it may take an experienced retailer only a second to realize that your old Epiphone is actually a Nova 390, produced from 1976 to 1980 in the company’s short-lived Japanese factory. The shop employee may be glad to look up the approximate value of your ax in a book and give you an opinion about what it’s worth. But if you randomly drop by a store that you’ve never been to before and ask for this kind of help, they might not take the time to look carefully at what you’ve got.LEARNING THE HISTORYIf you want to educate yourself to identify guitars, the first step is to become familiar with the histories of some of the larger companies.

In recent years, more and more books providing information on the major guitar manufacturers have become available, and they’re a great place to start. There are some basic questions to ask.

When did the company start building guitars? Where were the guitars manufactured? Did the company move in the course of its existence, and did it move its production overseas? Did the model in question change drastically during the years of production?

For example, Gibson’s J-200 started out with rosewood back and sides and fairly standard X-bracing in the late 1930s. It was changed to maple back and sides (except for a few rosewood examples) and a double-X bracing pattern in the ’50s. Yet another double-X bracing pattern was used during the ’70s, and then a more Martin-like scalloped X-bracing was adopted when the model was reintroduced in the late ’80s. These are all differences that would be difficult for the uneducated eye to notice, yet they drastically affect the guitar’s sound and value.At the very least, these books will identify the time period during which the guitar in question was produced, basic information that will, for example, keep you from paying a premium for a '1960s Martin HD-28' (you’ll know that this model wasn’t introduced until 1976). Sometimes you can narrow down even further the time period in which your guitar was built because of a certain distinguishing feature. For example, a volute or scroll at the back of a Gibson headstock usually indicates that the instrument was built between 1974 and 1981 (although some appeared as early as 1969).Another thing that the trained eye will immediately be able to pick up on is whether an instrument was built in the U.S.

Or imported from one of the many low-end Asian manufacturers. When I worked in retail, a customer once walked in with a Ventura archtop for sale.

Convinced that he had a guitar that was built in the U.S. In the ’50s, he stormed out after I told him what I’d be able to offer him for it. Even if I hadn’t known that Venturas were made in Japan during the ’70s (which was confirmed by a quick look in the Vintage Guitar Price Guide), I knew as soon as he opened the case. It was mostly the guitar’s thick finish that gave it away, complete with lacquered neck-to-body joints and drips through the f-holes. The wimpy hardware was another dead giveaway that this guitar was neither domestically made, as he thought, nor a high-quality import. The best place to gain this kind of familiarity is at your local music store’s used-and-cheap section; the more guitars you inspect, the more experienced you’ll be.One of the biggest roadblocks in identifying a guitar can often be the serial number.

These numbers are frequently inconsistent or missing from reference books. In many cases, a serial number by itself is about as useful as a phone number with a missing digit. Few companies have consistently used the same system of numbering during their entire existence (Martin is among those that have). For example, Gibson began using an eight-digit number in 1977.

The first and fifth digits indicated the year of production (8XXX2XXX meant it was built in 1982). If you tried to apply this formula to a serial number on an older Gibson, or even a newer vintage reissue (which sometimes use 'vintage' serial numbers) you’d be making a big mistake.REFERENCE BOOKSSo, how does one go about accurately identifying a used instrument? Probably the publication most often referred to is Gruhn’s Guide to Vintage Guitars. Written by George Gruhn (of Gruhn Guitars in Nashville) and Walter Carter, the guide is a must-have for identifying older American-made guitars. Organized into brands, general information, serial numbers, specific features, and model designations, the book identifies most major-brand guitars of the past and offers meticulous descriptions and a wealth of helpful photos. It offers little or no information on smaller makers, budget instrument makers, and recent entries into the guitar market.Although designed to give approximate values for vintage instruments, the Vintage Guitar Price Guide is also quite useful in identifying instruments. While it doesn’t describe each model’s features in detail, it does provide a company history for most of the makers included.

The book’s many photos can be very helpful, and the general listings, which include many off-brands, are among the most complete available. As with all price guides, the dollar amounts shown are to be taken with a grain of salt, but having even a vague idea of an instrument’s value will make you a more savvy buyer or seller.Another excellent resource is the Blue Book of Guitars. This hefty book probably represents the most complete compilation of information on guitars that have not yet reached vintage status.

Ventura Guitar Serial Number Lookup

Ventura Guitars Models

It’s one of the few books that lists instruments made by companies such as Kay and J.B. Player and by individual luthiers such as Dave Maize and Steve Klein. Besides retail price information, the book includes brief descriptions of most companies and models listed, as well as a unique section on grading the condition of an instrument. In a color section, a variety of guitars are pictured front and back, showing a range of possible conditions-from 20 percent (poor) to 100 percent (new).You can also join guitar-related newsgroups on the Internet, but beware of advice from uneducated participants posing as guitar experts. Of particular interest to acoustic guitarists are rec.music.makers.guitar.acoustic, rec.music.makers.guitar.jazz, and rec.music.classical.guitar.

Find Guitar By Serial Number

You might also check out rec.music.makers.guitar and alt.guitar.These resources and the others in the Acoustic Guitar Owner's Manual should help you on your way to becoming a guitar expert. All you need is hours and hours of paging through every available book on the subject, countless weekends spent at guitar shops and vintage instrument shows, a careful examination of all of your picking buddies’ axes, and (let’s face it) the purchase of a lemon or two.Excerpted from Acoustic Guitar magazine, October 1998, No. 70.Toll Free 877-712-4747.

[icebirdband]

LOS ANGELES CITY BEAT Aug 24-30, 2006 ⋆ VOL. 4 NO. 35

MUSIC NOW DOWNTOWN'S PALLADIUM OF ART-DAMAGE: THE SMELL STREET LOVE: ROBBY DANGER AND TANYA AVULA OUTSIDE OF ZAMAKIBO!

Downtown Skronk Art and noise venues thrive halfway down the L.A. underground ~ BY RON GARMON ~

AFTER DARK, DOWNTOWN LA'S BUSI-ness district scares the mortal pantload out of most Angelenos. By late afternoon, the offices empty out, the vendors pack up, and the pavement around the pricy hotels begins to sprout security, leaving the streets for mean drunks, jackrollers with a hundred dumb hustles, and some of the most destitute people on public display in America; some little better than walking corpses. Far be-low the expensive aeries of Gallery Row (where a sprinkling of showfolk and high-artisans cling to the vault of in-habitable space like merry self-sculpted gargoyles) is sonic terra incognita, where the tourist, the rube, the dilettante simply will not venture. Most choices between friends for live music follow a sidewalk conversation I over-heard last Friday afternoon near Pico and La Brea. Quoth dood to another, "Man, where we go tonight?" His partner muttered "Downtown," and was checked with "Man, I do not want to be shot!"

As deplorable as this attitude is to civic boosters, I approve of it. What Westsiders say about downtown, the world soon believes, so if some TV scenarist depicts the vicinity as home to Crip and killer mutant, then small wonder locals avoid and tourists flee, fearful the very pavement will spit up their bones. One of the aesthetic benefits of a collapsing capitalism is the sheer acreage of neglected urban space from which some jittery owner would love to derive income, any income. inevitably, an ambitious someone turns on the power, loads in amps and equipment, and the neighborhood begins to orchestrate its own scratchy, discordant score. Here, far from the rhino-stomp of tourism and the death-embrace of hip, one may detect the call-and-response skronk of a music scene dependent on neither. Here, there be monsters. 

Downtown's palladium of art-damage is the Smell. Since blowing off the pricy, constipated NoHo arts district in 1999, This all-ages avant-performance space has lived on the other side of a tiny neon sign on Harlem Place (an otherwise deserted a!leyway behind the Jalisco Inn on South Main), adding a bloc of downtown arties to its core patronage of under-21s and disaffected hip-sters. Usually described as a "storefront," the space is more a brick alleyway with a stage at the end, though acts do load in and wail in every corner. Elegantly battered the-ater seats scavenged from some defunct Odeon or Bi-joux line the main room's walls, with armchairs, book-shelves, and paintings scattered around the outer “lobby." The unisex toilet is an unforgettable riot of band stick-ers and appeals to sturdy common sense (like "GEORGE W. BUSH IS STILL A PUNK-ASS CHUMP") , and the vol-unteer staff enforces the no-booze rule. The cover is typ-ically five bucks and worth it. 

This revered pile has been dubbed a contemporary version of the Masque (L.A.'s first punk-rock venue, open in Hollywood from 1977 to 1979), and the wide range of ferocious avant-rock acts that appear there —Car-la Bozulich, Dos (Mike Watt and Kira Roessler), Deer-hoof, Upsilon Acrux — makes the boast credible. One re-cent show had Redondo Beach homocore punks Le Joshua wedged into an outer com, like cranked tigers, the vocalist snarling unintelligible abuse at fresh-faced patrons and writhing on his belly. The main area was lat-er infested by This Song Is a Mess, But So Am I, a one-man art-noize haybaler named Freddy Ruppert. Chunky machine-beats choogle underneath icy synth lines as distorto-screech resolves-itself into melodic postpunk as caressing as 154-era Wire. last Saturday night (August 19) was a heavily attended CD-release party for Captain Ahab's Snakes on the Brain, which uncoincidentally turns up on the similarly named Sam Jackson squirmfest now in theaters. Kings of the burgeoning "ravesploitation" movement, this duo packed 'em in with a freakish amal-gam of house, ambient, postpunk, and Giorgio Mo-roder pop boiled to jump-gumbo. Scores of teenage boys sweated in bounding monkey-heaps while their girlfriends sprawled patiently on the divans outside the main room. 

The ladies were having a better time of it at Zamakibo! a mile away. Situated along an ill-lit swatch of South Grand Avenue spiky with broken pavement, this plush and cuddly art space opened earlier this year, such tiny fame as it enjoys deriving from word of 'net. The small room was overflowing like rock 'n' roll Playskool when arrived late last Friday night, with a dou-ble-homeroom's-Worth of 1979 new-wave kidz gambol-ing in and out. The management— two energetic fellows named Turtle Z and Tumbleweed keep unobtrusive or-der and enforce the no-booze policy — and several pa-trons spotted the "writer from CityBeat" as he loped out of the pitch in the shape of a bleached-blond hillbilly. Onstage, frontchick Ammo of no-wave rompers Teenage Talking Cars looked heavily sloshed and was playfully showing a smitten heckler. Anon, photographer Jennifer Miller arrived with retinue and began to clump far-from-bashful patrons into portrait groupings. The kidz seemed to understand what was going on; as I scribbled notes and picked my way through the tangle of spoon-ing couples on the sidewalk, one gorgeous urchin called out to me, "Up to no good again, huh?" 

Perhaps, but even Coleridge nodded, and Proust's flashbacks made him immortal. I was in such a mood the next day at Little Pedro's Blue Bongo. A community hub with mailing-list-only show announcements, Little Pedro's bids fair to become downtown's version of Mr. T's Bowl, a character-laden scene oasis far off the clubland path. This genial over-21 establishment perched on the cor-ner of Vignes and First (at the last light on the west side of the Los Angeles River). hosts live or spun music every night of the week, with emphasis on themed evenings and cultish rock acts like Icebird and Oliver Future. This past weekend, however, I limped into the bar feel-ing a bit depleted, but in time for "Back in the Saddle Saturday." This meant I listened to an hour's worth of classic country by Loretta Lynn, Buck Owens, Faron Young, and more in glorious near-solitude, dreaming of my Appalachian boyhood to the tune of my mom's record collection. The decor is kitsch-Americana with Mid-dle Eastern touches, with a long shuffleboard table and plenty of padded benches and 1970s-vintage vinyl chairs in the barnlike space. The room is dominated by Little Pete, a giant polar pear hanging suspended by chain-har-ness from the wall over the bar. Some taxidermist's mas-terpiece, Pete glowers at all with fine impartiality, sym-bol of the poker-faced extravagance of Los Angeles, a town that goes to immense pains to nourish absurdity. 

I finished my club soda and left, feet backward-shuf-fling to the pavement while eyes took in a last sentimental glance at the lady bartender's magnificent ass; decor wortthy of awed notice as any two tons of Ursus maritimus. *

[jonathanbogart]

Yugotones: Balkan Communist Pop and New Wave

Part six of seven (probably). Parts one through five can be found by clicking the tag “my mixology career” at the bottom of this post; probably wait until you’ve clicked through to the full post before you do that, though. (Yes, I am explaining Tumblr to people who are not on Tumblr.)

The YouTube playlist for this mix is here. The tracklist is below; my notes on the mix, the background, and the songs are below that.

Bebi Dol, “Rudi”

Xenia, “Troje”

Zabranjeno Pušenje “Zenica blues”

Data, “Neka ti se dese prave stvari”

Dorian Gray, “Za tvoje oči”

Borghesia, “On”

Idoli, “Bambina”

Film, “Boje su u nama”

Bastion, “Hollywood”

Slađana Milošević, “Ja sam neka čudna vrsta”

Bliski Susret, “Kao nekad”

Plavi Orkestar, “Suada”

D’Boys, “Mi smo D’Boys”

Denis i Denis, “Program tvog kompjutera”

Gjurmët, “Të shtrirë mbi kanape”

Zana Nimani, “Što ne znam gde si sad”

Paraf, “Fini dečko”

Crvena Jabuka, “Nek’ te on ljubi”

U Škripcu, “Siđi do reke”

Videosex, “Moja Mama”

Josipa Lisac, “Ja bolujem”

Yugotones: balkan communist pop and new wave

For a long time when I was planning these mixes, I was going to lump all of Eastern Europe together into one Behind The Iron Curtain mix. But the more I listened and read and understood, the less snugly that seemed to fit the facts. Not just because Yugoslavia had broken away from the Soviet-aligned Eastern Bloc in the 1960s, siding with Maoist China in the Sino-Soviet split, but because Yugoslavian media — print, radio, and television — did not wholly abjure the decadent West. State-owned record labels issued foreign and local beat groups in the 60s and prog and hard rock groups in the 70s, with the result that the Balkan punk wave hit roughly contemporaneously with the French, Spanish, Italian, etc. waves. (Meanwhile, in the Soviet sphere, Fifties and Sixties rock signifiers were only just starting to gain official approval, as we will see.)

There was, and is, far more complexity to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia as it existed between 1945 and 1992 than I can hope to convey here, even if I fully grasped it all, which I don’t remotely. But put simply: ethnic tensions, especially between the richer, more populous, and administratively overrepresented Serbs and minority populations like Croats and Bosnians, were always high. The 1980 death of President-for-Life Josip Broz Tito, who came to power fighting Fascists in the 1940s, accelerated those tensions, and ghouls like Slobodan Milošević would take advantage of the power vacuum to stoke the flames of ethnic resentment: the horrific post-breakup wars of the 1990s, which are all most of us know about the Balkans, were far more the product of sustained propaganda campaigns than of any regional propensity for violence — indeed, propensities for violence are inculcated by means of sustained propaganda. (Which is how toxic masculinity, to choose an example not at all at random, operates.)

But very little of that grimness, tension, or rage is present within this music, which like much of the rest of European pop in the early 80s is both excited and wary about new technology, eagerly devouring the new and rummaging through the old to see what can be relevantly cannibalized, and giddy with its own creative strength. Although Eastern European and Balkan rock has since the 80s gained a certain reputation for seriousness, not to say dourness, that’s only partly true here — mostly, granted, because my own predilections privilege the froth and giddiness of pop rather than the grim chug of rock, but also because Yugoslav society (to the extent it was a unified society) was much freer and more open in the 80s than it had been for decades. The death of Tito functioned much like the death of Franco had in Spain: the old truths (and especially the old censorships) no longer held, and all kinds of material rose to fill a marketplace which had weathered thirty years of the Cold War better than any other in Eastern Europe.

In fact, you have to go to MTV in the Us or Top of the Pops in the UK to find as much solid pop-video work as there is in this mix: most of the biggest songs had several different videos, because there were a lot of competing pop shows on Yugoslav television and sometimes they each commissioned their own video.

There is still plenty of Communism represented in the mix, though: notably the predominance of the state record label, Jugoton, as the issuer of most of the music below. Variants mostly reflect the city of origin, to which point: Yugoslavia was a federation of six socialist republics: Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Slovenia, Macedonia, and Montenegro, as well as two autonomous communities within Serbia, Kosovo and Vojvodina. Linguistically diverse (Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin are all to some degree mutually intelligible, but Slovene, Macedonian, and Kosovar Albanian are not), ethnically and religiously heterogeneous, and with a long history of nominal administrative unity but distinct local practices, Yugoslavia represents the point in these mixes where my slender grasp on the languages in question fails entirely.

There are seven Serbian, seven Croatian, three Bosnian, two Slovene, one Macedonian and one Kosovar songs, not that I could distinguish any of them except diacritically. Albania, the Balkan socialist republic bounded by Yugoslavia and the Mediterranean, is not represented at all except linguistically (Kosovo is largely ethnic Albanian); state repression of non-folk popular music was enforced in Tirana until the 1990s.

I think that’s all the hedging I wanted to do. Although this project has been called a “deep dive,” I think of it much more as a surface skim. Anyone with the patience to click around on YouTube, fact-check against Discogs, and use Chrome’s translation tools could do the same. You can too. If you like anything you hear, you should.

1. Bebi Dol Rudi PGP RTB | Belgrade, 1983

We open with perhaps the most perfect pop song produced in Eastern Europe all decade: a valentine to Rudolph Valentino, sung by Serbian pop starlet Dragana Šarić. Her stage name is such deliberately infantilizing phonetic English that the breadth of her music, far from being lolita-esque dance-pop, can take the unwary by surprise. Her work was influenced by jazz, Arabic pop, and traditional Slavic folk as well as international pop: and despite its puppy-love lyrics, “Rudi” is structurally surprising, as she takes a basic pop song and unfolds unexpected harmonic filigree in post-chorus vocal flights. The voluptuous sweep of the melody fits in well with the plush erotic fantasies enacted on screen by Valentino: one video clip has Šarić intercut with scenes The Sheik, which helps elucidate the colonialist trappings of Western commodified (heterosexual) desire.

2. Xenia Troje Jugoton | Zagreb, 1984

What I always think of as the Blondie model of pop — a sharp pop-rock band fronted by a cool, attractive woman — was extremely popular in the early 1980s, and in Yugoslavia every major ethnicity had their own. Xenia was the Croatian version: singer Vesna Vrandečić was the singer, although on this single (“Three”) she cedes the chorus to the band’s guitarist and songwriter Robert Funčić’s laid-back almost-rap. Since it’s a song about the drama of men fighting over a woman, and the chorus is first-person from one of the men, it makes a kind of sense: but overshadowing both singers is the tense, blustery edge of the music, all paranoia and bluster, replicating the physical sensation of being in the room for such a fight.

3. Zabranjeno Pušenje Zenica blues Jugoton | Sarajevo, 1984

Although one of the smaller and poorer republics in the Yugoslav federation, Bosnia was one of the few to engender an honest-to-goodness local cultural movement (as opposed to merely imitations of Western models) in the 1980s. The “Novi primitivizam” (New Primitivism) that swept Sarajevo between 1981 and 1987 was a jocular proletarian reaction to the self-serious New Romanticism of British import (and Croatian popularization, as we will see) and Slovenian Neue Slowenische Kunst (we’ll see a bit of that too). Zabranjeno Pušenje were perhaps the foremost Novi primitivizam band: a folk-punk outfit like the Fugs or the Mekons, their music was characterized by local slang (often borrowed Turkicisms), simple melodies, and rudimentary instrumentation. Their low-key anthem “Zenica blues” (sometimes “bluz”) is a Johnny Cash-like tale of petty criminality, prison sentences, and the gloomy garrison at Zenica.

4. Data Neka ti se dese prave stvari Jugoton | Belgrade, 1984

YouTube comments are full of how this is a copy of Depeche Mode’s “See You,” but a synthesizer doing the wedding-bells riff from the end of “Then He Kissed Me” isn’t exactly an original thought. Regardless, it’s a beautiful synthpop gem from associates of Serbian synth-funk collective the Master Scratch Band. The three members of Data, who also played behind the Scratch Band’s girl group Šizike, only produced a single 45 under that name, but have been endlessly compiled and reissued on the strength of it.

5. Dorian Gray Za tvoje oči Jugoton | Zagreb, 1985

The Croatian adoption of the British New Romantic ethos found its greatest exponents in a band named after an Oscar Wilde character, whose first single, “Sjaj u tami,” was a Scott Walker cover, and whose singer, Massimo Savić, ran the gamut of glam-rock masculinity from David Bowie fey to Bryan Ferry louche. “Za tvoje oči” (For Your Eyes) was the title song from their second LP, a crooning, brooding masterpiece but commercially disappointing; the following year, Savić went solo, and has become an elder statesman of glamorous, elegant Croatian pop.

6. Borghesia On FV Založba | Ljubljana, 1985

The most famous musical wing of the Neue Slowenische Kunst (New Slovenian Art; the German title is intentional) was the long-serving industrial band Laibach — since they primarily sing in English, they don’t  appear here. But fellow-travelers Borghesia, also industrial, electronic, and dark, primarily sang in Slovene. “On” (He) is a full-on Electronic Body Music song, as developed by Belgian group Front 242: arpeggiators and screams soundtrack lyrics to a descent into fetishism which even in choppy Google Translate makes Venus in Furs read like Mother Goose. The video needs no translation: it’s not remotely safe for work.

7. Idoli Bambina Jugoton | Belgrade, 1983

More or less the founders and guiding spirit of the Serbian new wave, Idoli (Italian for idols) came to prominence in 1980 with songs like the post-punk “Retko te viđam sa devojkama” (I Rarely See You with Girls), about closeted homosexuality, and the Cossack-ska “Maljčiki” (Boys), mocking Soviet socialist-realist aesthetics. By 1983 they had produced several of the landmark albums of the era and had little left to prove; their final album Čokolada (Chocolate) was a huge-selling last hurrah, full of pop hooks and complicated sentiment. “Bambina” sounds like a love song, but the lyrics are actually full of suspicion and resentment.

8. Film Boje su u nama Jugoton | Zagreb, 1983

The Croatian standard-bearers of new wave — so much Idoli’s counterparts that they co-headlined a joint tour in 1981 — by 1983 Film were closer to the shiny guitar-pop of classic rock than to the twistier, more acerbic edge of new wave. Their 1983 album Sva čuda svijeta (All the Wonders of the World) leaned into the Hollywood signifiers suggested by their name: album opener “Boje su u nama” (We Are Made of Stars) includes Dirty Harry, Kubrick, and MGM references before the song even kicks in. When it does, it’s a blissed-out relative of “Start Me Up,” as hippy-glam as Marc Bolan at his best.

9. Bastion Hollywood PGP RTB | Skopje, 1984

The sole representative of Macedonia in this mix, Bastion was a four-person operation: one on synths, one on bass, one on vocals, and one on songwriting and visual art. The result of that skeletal operation was a surprisingly dubby approach to synthpop, as singer Ana Kostovska’s Lwin-y vocals wander around an endless funk-bass echo chamber punctuated by all kinds of sounds. The lyrics are the usual trenchant commentary on the dream factory that you would expect from the title, but the bass is the reason to listen.

10. Slađana Milošević Ja sam neka čudna vrsta Jugoton | Belgrade, 1983

My choice of this song to represent Slađana Milošević (her first name can also be written Sladjana) is perhaps eccentric, but it fit too well in the mix to not. Something between the Grace Jones and the Nina Hagen of Serbian new wave, she had weathered controversy in the late 70s for her Patti Smith-inspired rock, and was such an international pop star that her 1983 record Neutral Design was recorded in Munich with German musicians. It’s a hell of a record: every song made it onto Yugoslav television, often in multiple videos, and they’re all good. This, the closer (“I’m an Odd Sort”), is unexpectedly light and breezy: a witchy, jazzy calypso in which she mostly sticks to a high, soft register to sing about forbidden knowledge and how poor an adept the song’s “you” is.

11. Bliski Susret Kao nekad Jugoton | Zagreb, 1984

It wouldn’t be an entry in this mix series if I didn’t include at least one single that has never been reissued and is only available on YouTube. The Croatian act called Bliski Susret (Close Encounter) only issued a single song (the B-side is the same song in English), this beautiful slice of studio-based nostalgia, all production and sentiment. It was a one-man show: Željko Bošković, whose real career has been as a studio owner and producer in Zagreb, producing some of the best Croatian pop of the last thirty years. “Kao nekad” (Like Before), which sums up romantic pop from Spector to Gainsbourg,  remains a swoon-worthy calling card.

12. Plavi Orkestar Suada Jugoton | Sarajevo, 1985

Bosnian pop in the 80s was not at all just the New Primitivism, although no doubt its emphasis on stripped-down structures and folkloric origins had some influence on Plavi Orkestar, who sound exactly like what a Western conception of “Balkan pop-punk” might be. Anatolian rock riffs, all-comrades-together shouted choruses, and lovelorn lyrics about a faithless woman — and in the middle eight, about forgetting the faithless woman by going out on the town with your boys — made “Suada” a huge hit, the first of Plavi Orkestar’s long and enviable career.

13. D’Boys Mi smo D’Boys Jugoton | Belgrade, 1983

There are more differences than similarities, but the act that kept coming to mind as I dug into the D’Boys discography was Wham! Like George and Andrew, they were dismissed as lightweight pop fluff compared to the Real Rockers surrounding them; like George, Peđa D'Boy (Predrag Jovanović) assimilated a host of influences and went largely unrecognized as an innovator who predicted much of the trashier end of the European 90s. Which doesn’t mean that the Laughing Gnome effect which opens this drum-machine-and-guitar-bash anthem isn’t a throwback; but it’s also a sound I’ve heard a lot more often in global pop in the 2010s. “Mi smo D’Boys” means “We Are D’Boys,” and Peđa’s party (in both senses) sloganeering over its dumb-brick simplicity makes me think of such ironists as Morrissey, Neil Tennant, and Jarvis Cocker — another D’Boys track, “Sexy Sexy,” sounds unaccountably like “Common People.”

14. Denis i Denis Program tvog kompjutera Jugoton | Rijeka, 1984

Comparing Croatian synthpop duo Denis i Denis to British acts like Eurythmics or Yazoo is probably less illuminating than otherwise; but the general set-up is equivalent. Davor Tolja was the synthesizer maven, Marina Perazić the voice and sex symbol: her gasps and strangled sobs during recording were as important to the band’s electronic-erotic aesthetic as her low, singing voice. This single (Your Computer Program) was their biggest hit, but they were so consistent between 1983 and 1988 that just about any record could have gone in.

15. Gjurmët Të shtrirë mbi kanape RTP | Pristina, 1985

The sole representative of Kosovo on this mix, Gjurmët were very nearly the first rock act to sing in Albanian ever, and probably the first recorded. Their only release during their years of activity in the 1980s was a cassette delayed by the censors for over a year due to perceived Albanian nationalism, but later reissues, as both Albanian and Kosovar culture has become more open, have kept their memory faintly alive. “Të shtrirë mbi kanape” (Sprawled on the Couch) is their best uptempo song, urgent and moody, with superb new-wave guitar heroics from Bekim Dyla.

16. Zana Nimani Što ne znam gde si sad Jugoton | Belgrade, 1986

If Xenia was the Croatian Blondie, the Serbian edition was Zana, with a series of sparkling power-pop hits over the early 80s. But when singer Zana Nimani, for whom the band was named, left in 1985, the band carried on with a succession of new singers and little diminution in popularity. Nimani’s only solo album, 1986’s Noćas pevam samo tebi (Tonight I Sing Only for You) was recorded in Sweden, and this minor hit (I Don’t Know Where You Are Now) sounds like it: shiny and heartfelt, only her melodramatic voice gives her away as Balkan.

17. Paraf Fini dečko ZKP RTVL | Zagreb, 1981

In these mixes I’ve had little patience for straight-up punk or its immediate descendents, but Paraf are unique and strong enough to be an exception. They began as a shouty punk band, and were important enough to make the 1979 compilation documenting Zagreb’s punk scene; but after their first album in 1980 singer Valter Kocijančić quit, and female singer Vim Cola (Pavica Mijatović), and keyboardist Raul Varlen joined. They moved towards anthemic post-punk, as documented by this first single in the new line-up. “Fini dečko” means “FIne Boyfriend,” and the lyrics document how weirded out Cola is by a good, clean, upright boy. They would go on to make some of the most politically righteous music of the Croatian new wave, but this single, with one foot still in punk, is their most fun.

18. Crvena Jabuka Nek’ te on ljubi Jugoton | Sarajevo, 1986

Don’t be fooled by the huge glossy opening chords: Crvena Jabuka (Red Apple) aren’t a Sarajevan Van Halen (not that that would be a bad thing). They’re closer to a Bosnian Enuff Z’Nuff: a shiny hard-rock body over a winsome 60s-pop chassis. Named after the Beatles label, their self-titled debut album in 1986 was an immediate hit: but several months later the lead singer and the bass player were killed in a car accident. The remaining members forged on, and achieved even greater success, becoming one of the key figures of late 80s and early 90s Yugoslav rock; they still record today. “Nek’ te on ljubi (Kad ne mogu ja)” (Let Him Love You [If I Cannot]) is a power-pop gem that had unexpected resonance after frontman Dražen Ričl was replaced, and surpassed, by keyboard player Dražen Žeri.

19. U Škripcu Siđi do reke Jugoton | Belgrade, 1983

This shouldn’t be your only exposure to Balkan pop: there’s so much I haven’t included, from synthpop pioneers Boa and cross-dressing glam-funk star Oliver Mandić to stuff I don’t even know about. But after hearing it, I had to include “Siđi do reke” (Come Down to the River) by post-punk band turned New Romantics U škripcu (In a Heartbeat) no matter who I bumped. A hovering, almost ambient piece, equal parts “In Every Dream Home a Heartache” and traditional Serbian folk song, it’s one of the magnificent centerpieces of 80s Yugoslav pop.

20. Videosex Moja Mama ZKP RTVL | Ljubljana, 1983

The Slovene equivalent to the Croatian Xenia and the Serbian Zana was Videosex, who were probably the best of them all: singer Anja Rupel had more personality and the band was more versatile, jumping from straight-up synthpop like “Moja Mama” (My Mama, a mocking pout about stepmothers) to the noirish “Detektivska priča” (Detective Story) and even reaching back to 1940s swing for “Tko je zgazio gospođu mjesec” (Who Was the Lady of the Month). Rupel would go on to sing with Laibach; but this early giddy work remains unspeakably delightful.

21. Josipa Lisac Ja bolujem Jugoton | Zagreb, 1987

Comparisons to Kate Bush would be arrant nonsense: Croatian singer Josipa Lisac had been a distinguished art-rock singer for a decade before “Wuthering Heights,” both with beat group Zlatni Akordi and on her own. But in the neon 80s her eccentric sense of style was given room to flourish, and she made a series of crucial recordings halfway between pop, electronic rock, and local art-song traditions. When she presented “Ja bolujem” (I’m Suffering) at the 1987 MESAM festival in a dress that moved on its own as dancers below it ran through an intricate choreography, it was a magnificent capstone on the first half of her career. She’s since gone on to a more sedate Céline-like goddesshood, but her voice is still one of the most powerful instruments in the Balkans.

Next: “Eastern Europe” is a vast territory to cover. Whatever I do, I will not do it justice. My only comfort is that I haven’t done justice to anywhere else either.

[jonathanbogart]

Magnitizdat: Soviet Aligned Pop and New Wave

Mix seven of seven. The previous mixes can be found here. The YouTube playlist for this mix can be found here. Below this paragraph is the tracklisting for this mix; below that are my notes on it. It’s been a gas.

Bravo, “Koshki”

Klaus Mitffoch, “Jezu jak się cieszę”

Spenót, “Szamba”

Tango, “Na šikmé ploše”

Forum, “Davayte sozvonimsya”

Urszula, “Wielki odlot”

Pankow, “Rock ‘n’ Roll im Stadtpark”

Florian din Transilvania, “Mă simt minunat”

Trick, “Elektronnoto kuche”

Dzeltenie Pastnieki, “Sliekutēva vaļasprieks”

Marika Gombitová, “Prekážky dní”

Grazhdanskaya Oborona, “Zoopark”

Gigi, “Divat a fontos”

Maanam, “Lucciola”

Silly, “Die Gräfin”

Kino, “Posledniy geroy”

Sfinx, “An după an”

Első Emelet, “Amerika”

Aya RL, “Skóra”

OK Band, “Žižkovská zeď”

Nastya, “Tatsu”

Magnitizdat: soviet aligned pop and new wave

In a just world, just about every nation represented here would get its own mix: Poland, Hungary, Czechia, and Russia, to name just the largest pop scenes, were (and are) too capacious to be summed up in the paltry handful of songs I’ve allotted them. But I’m already teetering on the furthest outside edge of my understanding. My grasp of Europe is comparable to Saul Steinberg’s legendary view from 9th Avenue: the further East of the Pyrenees I get the more featureless and notional everything is.

To make things more complicated, although the seven nations (at the time; now 13½) represented in this mix were formally Soviet-aligned in terms of foreign policy and general economic structure, they all pursued different approaches to cultural policy, and those policies changed radically over the decades, and even from year to year. At the beginning of the 1980s, the Soviet Union was perhaps the most officially censorious in terms of rejecting Western influence, whereas places like Poland, Hungary, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia were relatively open to current trends in Western European culture, especially following the Prague Spring of 1968. Then too, one of the necessary preconditions for good pop is money (which doesn’t necessarily mean pure capitalism: state-funded arts education and broadcast media, e.g., made British pop the envy of the world), and many of the Eastern Bloc nations, whether or not they were eager to support international-style pop, were among the poorest in Europe.

Still, life finds a way. Electronic music in particular was taken up enthusiastically by many Warsaw Pact composers in the 1970s, both as a technical challenge and as a path forward into a Communist musical future that owed nothing to the dead traditions of the West. Young musicians in Warsaw, Riga, and Leningrad got hold of contraband records or reel-to-reel tapes (called magnitizdat in Russian, in parallel with printed samizdat, according to Wikipedia) of new and innovative forms of rock and pop, imitated them, and added their own perspectives. And Eastern European nations held their own national and international versions of Eurovision, and broadcast local singers in a variety of traditions, both as light entertainment and as a way to reinforce cultural nationalism.

So although Eastern Bloc pop in the 1980s was often cheaper and perhaps chintzier (or at least dedicated to different notions of cool) than its Western counterparts, there was still plenty of it; but it was also unevenly distributed. My division below is less about population size or global importance (either today or historically) than about what would fit into a single mix. There are six Soviet songs (five Russian, one Latvian), four Polish, three Hungarian, two East German, two Czech, one Slovak, two Romanian, and one Bulgarian. Linguistically, it’s my most diverse mix by far, with six Slavic languages, one Germanic, one Uralic, and one Romance language represented (the runner-up, Melodier, had five Germanic languages and one Uralic). Google Translate is my everything.

All of them are great songs, and most of them are great records as well (we’ll get to the exception), although I doubt anyone actually living in Eastern Europe, either at the time or presently, would group together these precise performers in this way: some were defiantly underground, some boringly mainstream, and most somewhere in the middle.

Most of these mixes have taken 1981 and 1987 as the boundary years: while this one ends with a longish 1987 track as per tradition, the rest of the songs are mostly clustered between 1983 and 1985. Due to protectionist policies (both Eastern and Western), inefficiencies of resource allocation, and the slow-to-arrive effects of glasnost, the new wave (if that’s even a useful term to describe a shift towards 1980s-era modernity in the diverse Communist scenes) rolled over Eastern Europe several years after it had blanketed the West. My early investigations all centered on 1984, and further research still marks that as a pivotal year.

Anyway, here’s what I’ve fallen in love with. I hope you dig it too.

1. Bravo Koshki no label | Moscow, 1985

WIth all apologies to Long Island’s Stray Cats, Southern California’s Blasters, England’s Shakin’ Stevens, West Germany’s Ace Cats, and Barcelona’s Loquillo, the greatest rockabilly revival act of the 1980s was the Russian Браво (Bravo). Formed in 1983 by guitarist Evgeny Havtan, with singer Zhanna Aguzarova signing on later that year, they played 1950s rock and roll with a side order of 1960s ska, with lyrics simple and catchy enough to be universal but subversive enough to get them into trouble. “Кошки” (Cats) could be a children’s song: “Cats don’t look like people, cats are cats,” is the opening lyric. But when Aguzarova adds that cats don’t talk nonsense or care about bits of paper, that’s questionable, and when she launches into some of the most thrilling scatting ever heard in rock & roll it’s downright revolutionary. After the band had self-released their first recordings on magnetic tape, she was arrested for using forged identity papers in 1984, and didn’t release a proper record until 1987. She left the band in 1989 for a solo career, and is beloved throughout Russia as a sort of Lady Gaga avant la lettre, while Bravo under Havtan and a succession of singers has continued to plow their rockabilly furrow to slightly diminished success.

2. Klaus Mitffoch Jezu jak się cieszę Tonpress | Wrocław, 1983

One of the most important Polish new wave bands, Klaus Mitffoch combined punk energy, two-tone nimbleness, and post-punk solemnity in a compulsively listenable and sometimes danceable mix. Their first single, Jezu jak się cieszę (Jesus, I’m Happy; the name is an interjection rather than an address) is a mordant portrait of callow youth that doesn’t think past the next payday, fight, or fuck, and of the system that keeps them that way: the shouty chorus translates as “Get up and be busy and own things/I can’t really do it/I don’t really want to.” A Polish “I prefer not to,” it’s a critique of the capitalist contract which worked just as well as a critique of Communist expectations: the lack of real difference between the oppressiveness of East and West will be an ongoing theme.

3. Spenót Szamba Start | Budapest, 1983

Although I’ve been attaching the tag “new wave” to these mixes, one of the signature sounds of the US new wave has been entirely unrepresented: the beachy kitsch of the B-52’s. Until now. Spenót (Spinach) was a Budapest arts collective founded in the early 80s which only released one single on the rock imprint of the Hungarian state label: “Szamba” (Samba) b/w “Hová tűntek a szőke nőket” (Where Did the Blondes Go). Casio, bass, guitar, and disaffected vocals from Kriszta Berzsenyi (now a costumer in the Hungarian film industry) make for a minimal-funk tribute to proletarian hero Popeye, as the refrain “Everything’s perfectly fine, I’ve got spinach flowing in my veins” makes clear. A late entrance from a mariachi trumpet only adds to the delightful kitsch effect, and makes me grin ear to ear every time I listen.

4. Tango Na šikmé ploše Supraphon | Prague, 1984

Although the island-borrowed rhythms and frontman Miroslav Imrich’s vocal qualities in this early song are rather heavily reminiscent of the Police, in terms of cultural positioning Tango were rather closer to Madness: a ska-pop band that could be goofy or heartfelt depending on the song, and burrowed deep into Czech working-class cultural identity, in part thanks to their inventive and prolific videos. Their first single, “Na šikmé ploše” (On the Slope) is a heartfelt and rather poetic love song on skis. Even after Tango’s dissolution, Imrich has been a consistently popular singer and songwriter in the years since, his work, both solo and in collaboration, ranging from ballads to techno.

5. Forum Davayte sozvonimsya no label | Moscow, 1984

A Russian synthpop band who owed nothing to such English decadents as Human League or Depeche Mode, Форум was fronted by singer Viktor Saltykov, who had previously sung with rock band Manufactura, and anchored by synth wizard Alexander Morozov. The video for Давайте созвонимся (Let’s Call Each Other), from an early television appearance, has become a minor internet classic of kitschy Soviet aesthetics, but a google of the lyrics reveals as thoughtful and sensitive a song about love under modern technological conditions as anything Gary Numan or Scritti Politti ever recorded. Forum’s debut album wouldn’t see official release until 1987, by which time a lot of Russian pop had caught up to them.

6. Urszula Wielki odlot Polton | Lublin, 1984

Perhaps Poland’s most prominent female rock star for the last forty years, Urszula Kasprzak has recorded in a variety of styles, from hard rock to dance-pop; but her 1984 album Malinowy król (Raspberry King), recorded with members of prog band Budka Suflera, is a minor masterpiece of cool, reflective synthpop. “Wielki odlot” (The Great Departure) was the leadoff track and the album’s lowest-charting single, but I love its stately swell and the apocalyptic  lyrics (or maybe it’s just about emigration, which is another form of apocalypse). I’m looking forward into digging around into the rest of Urszula’s discography.

7. Pankow Rock ’n’ Roll im Stadtpark AMIGA | Berlin, 1983

East Germany probably had the most thoroughly Westernized and extensive pop scene in the whole Eastern Bloc — only natural, given its proximity and exposure to West German media. But child star Nina Hagen had to leave East Berlin to help found the Neue Deutsche Welle: East Germany preferred shaggy 70s rock even as icy synths overran the NATO countries. Pankow, formed in the eponymous suburb of East Berlin, was a case in point: definitely a new wave band, they still clearly adored old-fashioned boogie rock. “Rock ’n’ Roll im Stadtpark” (Rock ’n’ Roll in the City Park) is an anthem of Communist rock (even the shouted refrains are collectivized): dancing to rock & roll in the park is better than bourgeois disco or high-priced cinema, because it’s free. Of the people, by the people, for the people, oh yeah.

8. Florian din Transilvania Mă simt minunat Electrecord | Bucharest, 1986

The hermetic and impoverished Romanian scene, tightly controlled by Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Maoist-modeled authoritarian government, was the slowest of the European Communist nations to catch up to the present of the 1980s: officially supported music tended to be folkloric, balladic, and at its most up-to-date, hippie-era hard rock. Mircea Florian was one of the grand exceptions: beginning as a mid-60s folk-rocker in the mold of Dylan and Cohen, and maintaining a parallel interest in electronics and modern composers like Stockhausen and Nono, he moved through many progressive, electric, and Eastern-influenced musical phases over the next twenty years, often butting heads with the regime. His last great record, 1986’s Tainicul vîrtej (The Secret Swirl), released just before his defection to West Germany, was a summation of his folk- and art-rock past and his new-wave present. This opening track “I Feel Great,” is a statement of gleeful modernism, the lyrics an expression of bucolic alienation while the synthesizers and drum machines wander off on prog-rock solos before being recalled to robot rhythms.

9. Trick Elektronnoto kuche Balkanton | Sofia, 1985

If the Romanian rock scene was impoverished, its Bulgarian counterpart was even more so. Trick was a vocal group — two women, one man — put together out of music school in frank imitation of Western acts like ABBA, Boney M, or even (if the record sleeves are any indication) Tony Orlando and Dawn. But this cut from their first LP, “Electronic Dog,” was produced by the young, ambitious Kristian Boyadzhiev to a hypermodern sheen: if the girls are still essentially singing disco harmonies, at least the music has heard of ZTT. After release, the song was suppressed by Bulgarian state media on the grounds that the goofy lyrics and synthesized dog barks were making a mockery of Bulgarian electronics. But today, it sounds like it might predict Eastern European trance.

10. Dzeltenie Pastnieki Sliekutēva vaļasprieks no label | Riga, 1984

The underground new-wave scene in Latvia was apparently the most active and prolific in the Soviet Union outside Mother Russia: the Baltic seaport of Riga, as one of the USSR’s few access points to global culture, saw bands like Pērkons, NSRD, and Dzeltenie Pastnieki making waves even as their magnetic-tape recordings were suppressed by the Soviet authorities and not released for decades. I chose this song by Dzeltenie Pastnieki (Yellow Postmen) not because it’s exceptionally better than the rest of their material, which is all pretty great, but because its combination of electronic loops and sensitive guitar sounded surprisingly to me like the Postal Service. The pitch-shifted vocals, sure, sound more like “The Laughing Gnome,” but that’s no deal-breaker.

11. Marika Gombitová Prekážky dní Opus | Bratislava, 1984

Probably the biggest Slovak pop star of the era, Marika Gombitová had been well-known in the eastern half of Czechoslovakia since 1977, when she sang leads for the popular rock band Modus. This synthpop gem (Daily Obstacles) from her fifth album, the unselfconsciously-titled No. 5 (it was her first stab at singing to synthesizers), uses sporting metaphors to talk about desires that slip forever out of reach, the evocativeness of which imagery would not have been lost on a contemporary television-watching audience: Gombitová had been confined to a wheelchair, paralyzed from the shoulders down, following a car crash in 1981. Her marvelous voice, thin but strong, reminds me of Cyndi Lauper’s: and the gorgeous production, with its slippery bass and a haunting electronic solo in the middle eight, makes this maybe my favorite song in this mix.

12. Grazhdanskaya Oborona Zoopark no label | Omsk, 1985

Here’s that not-great record, meaning only that it’s extremely lo-fi, so much so that the tape hiss and room tone plays practically an aesthetic role, turning a simple rock ballad into a fuzz-pop gem that could sit side-by-side with contemporary work by the Beat Happening or Hüsker Dü. Гражданская Оборона (Civil Defense) was the psych-rock project of Siberian-born Yegor Letov; after their first magnetic tape, containing “зоопарк,” was recorded, band members were institutionalized, their subversive attitudes having been dutifully reported to the authorities by the guitarist's mother. That subversiveness isn’t hard to detect in this song, in which Letov dreams of finding other crazy people (like him) with whom he can plot an escape from the zoo of contemporary life.

13. Gigi Divat a fontos Start | Budapest, 1985

Nobody on the Internet seems to know anything about Gigi, not even whether the name is of a performer or a group. The writing credit on the Hungarian compilation LP where “Divat a fontos” (Fashion Matters) appeared is to “Gigi Együttes,” which latter word just means Ensemble. But a bunch of people on the Internet, some in Hungarian, some in English, and some in Polish, have warmly praised this song, an aerobic synthpop jam that combines the best of Kim Wilde and Olivia Newton-John. It’s apparently all that this Gigi (the thirty-first entity of that name on Discogs) ever recorded, but it’s enough.

14. Maanam Lucciola Polskie Nagrania Muza | Kraków, 1984

The post-punk band Maanam, on the other hand, are legends of Polish rock, with dozens of records and a rabid fanbase: one of the most successful and important Eastern European bands of the decade. Lead singer Kora (Olga Jackowska)’s vocal style owed little to Anglophone precedent, digging deep into Slavic and Polish modernism, even when, as here, the most frequent word in the song is the Italian woman’s name of the title. In “Lucciola,” Kora dispassionately portrays a man searching for the titular woman in the night wind, while the band’s brawny Gang of Four funk motorvates right along regardless.

15. Silly Die Gräfin AMIGA | Berlin, 1982

Probably the most interesting East German rock band of the 1980s, Silly was centered around the vocal performances of Tamara Danz, who could be kabarett-outrageous in one song and luminously synthpop-tender in the next. “Die Gräfin” (lit. The Countess, but also slang for any stuck-up woman) is a funk-rock vehicle for her gift for satirical vocal caricature, as she mocks the decayed German aristocracy from a victorious proletarian point of view. Not that Danz was a strict ideologue: in 1989, she joined other East German musicians in demanding greater freedom, in protests that helped lead to the collapse of the Communist consensus. She died in 1996 of breast cancer, far too young.

16. Kino Posledniy geroy AnTrop | Leningrad, 1984

The only Russian band represented on this mix whose music was officially released within the era under consideration, Кино (Cinema) were no less skeptical about the Soviet system than their peers, just luckier in that they hooked up with the independent Leningrad-based AnTrop label, which gave them cover for sarcastic, despairing songs like Последний герой (Last of the Heroes), in which the familiar 80s theme of nuclear annihilation gets another airing, and East and West turn out to be not so different after all.

17. Sfinx An după an Electrecord | Bucharest, 1984

When Mircea Florian was one of the leading lights of Romanian prog in the 1970s, one of his few competitors in the field was the band Sfinx (Sphinx), formed in the mid-60s to play Western-style pop/rock. In the following decade, they grew more ambitious, taking cues from Yes, King Crimson, and Genesis, the last of whom, in their 80s incarnation, is a reference point here. “An după an” means Year After Year, and even though it was only their second LP (they were constantly running afoul of the Romanian censors), it was occasion for a wistful look back over the last twenty years.

18. Első Emelet ‎Amerika Start | Budapest, 1983

Perhaps the most popular Hungarian rock band of the early 80s, Első Emelet (First Floor) was formed from the remnants of several less fortunate acts which imploded around 1982. With a bright, energetic sound, witty lyrics by songwriter Péter Geszti, and an irreverent comic sensibility to their visual presentation, they were just the kind of band that would have been a lock to appear on MTV if they weren’t from a Communist nation. In fact, they did anyway — one of the television screens in Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” is playing an Első Emelet video. Their first single, “Amerika” is a terrific satire of that consumerist paradise, rendered with all the plastic pomp the subject deserve.

19. Aya RL Skóra Tonpress | Warsaw, 1984

One of the greatest long-running European indie-rock bands, Aya RL (for Red Love) formed when Russian keyboardist Igor Czerniawski and Polish singer Paweł Kukiz met in Warsaw. “Skóra” (Skin), their biggest hit and most well-loved song (I dare you to get that wordless chorus out of your head), is somewhat unrepresentative of their more psychedelic and intellectual work — but it’s a great song, a portrait of love despite the turmoil and violence of the heavily politicized street culture of Warsaw in the 1980s.

20. OK Band Žižkovská zeď Supraphon | Prague, 1982

If you didn’t know anything about Eastern Bloc music in the 1980s and relied only on what the Western media of the time showed you, you might expect it all to sound like this: icy, measured, foreboding. In fact, “Žižkovská zeď” (The Zizkov Wall) is just about the slowest and coldest song in Czech synthpop act OK Band’s repertoire: most of it is much cheerier and romantic. But I really dig its coldwave vibes and the sound of Marcela Březinová’s voice singing about the awful feeling of seeing your name written in graffiti by an unknown hand.

21. Nastya Tatsu no label | Sverdlovsk, 1987

Thanks no doubt to my own global position — in the (allegedly) democratic West — I’ve been focused throughout this mix on how the music of Communist Europe responds to or relates to or recalls its Western counterparts. But with “Tatsu,” the gaze shifts not West, but East. Nastya, a band formed on the border of Europe and Asia, and named after its frontwoman, singer, composer and poet Anastasia Polova, was fascinated with Japanese folklore, history, and mythology. The Tatsu of the title is both a Japanese child left for dead in World War II (that’s where the bits in English come in), and a mythological dragon-god protecting islands in the Pacific. It’s an amazing song, the centerpiece of an amazing album, and the fact that it only circulated as a bootleg tape for a decade before being officially issued in the mid-90s is the strongest indictment of late-Soviet cultural policy I know. I say that as a Communist.

That’s it, that’s all the mixes. For now, anyway. Thanks for reading and listening and sharing and liking. I’ve got other projects to keep me busy; I’ll try to mention them here from time to time.