Photo from TMWTG archive
Most extreme-music practitioners work in the comfort of their mummy’s house, fat asses propped up by mum’s gingham pillows, pudgy fingers clamped around steaming mugs of bedtime cocoa. When they’ve finished slaving away on their expensive computer for, oh, three minutes, they self-release their thirteenth-rate Throbbing Gristle bullshit on a 3” CD with a swastika or penis symbol on it. Done.
You know what? Fuck those losers. All over Russia there are thousands of starving near-corpses who make extreme electronic music so fucking raw that it caught the attention of the daddy of power electronics, Whitehouse’s William Bennett, who is compiling it all into something called Extreme Music For Russia.
By bribing them with Western clothes and hassling them on their primitive version of email, Bennett’s uncovered thousands of desperate musicians, some of whom are so short of decent gear that they make their noise music by rubbing rusted, long-empty borscht cans up and down the motor of their 1950s vacuum-cleaner fan while their mate Boris fiddles about with the dial on a totally fucked black-and-white TV that is showing the first season of The Simpsons for the first time ever.
This music is so foreign to our pampered baby ears that it may as well come from Mars, but after sifting through this psychic wreckage of a genre, here are the three bands that made us despair the hardest.
Tea Man For Tea Gum
Best song: “Music for the Kids Without Any” (recorded live on Airspace 103.2FM)
Members: Philipp Wolokitin, G. Fretrixon, Boroja
Sounds like: The tape was all twisted but it sounded like rape.
Other information: They never sleep. Kryptogen Rundfunk
Best song: “Old Recipe For Modern Society”
Members: M.M., 21 years old, single.
Sounds like: A hundred mice trapped in a hundred tin cans
Other information: The song is dedicated to “oprichnina”—a system of internal political measures established by Ivan IV “Grozny” in 1565–1572 for abolition of probable treachery among the ruling class. It caused mass repression, bloody massacres, street executions, etc.
Other information: The guy told us, “I enjoy listening to natural sounds, especially radio waves.” Gintas K.
Best song: “o)o(o”
Members: Gintas K, aged 34.
Sounds like: Abortion
Other information: “I playing my music because I feel big pleasure from it. On other hand I don’t want to hurt myself so I must to play.” TIERNEY WILLIAMS
Best song: “Music for the Kids Without Any” (recorded live on Airspace 103.2FM)
Members: Philipp Wolokitin, G. Fretrixon, Boroja
Sounds like: The tape was all twisted but it sounded like rape.
Other information: They never sleep. Kryptogen Rundfunk
Best song: “Old Recipe For Modern Society”
Members: M.M., 21 years old, single.
Sounds like: A hundred mice trapped in a hundred tin cans
Other information: The song is dedicated to “oprichnina”—a system of internal political measures established by Ivan IV “Grozny” in 1565–1572 for abolition of probable treachery among the ruling class. It caused mass repression, bloody massacres, street executions, etc.
Other information: The guy told us, “I enjoy listening to natural sounds, especially radio waves.” Gintas K.
Best song: “o)o(o”
Members: Gintas K, aged 34.
Sounds like: Abortion
Other information: “I playing my music because I feel big pleasure from it. On other hand I don’t want to hurt myself so I must to play.” TIERNEY WILLIAMS