The Russian Music Scene

Written by flux

Good evening my young tracked music lovers,

Today we are going to talk about the Russian music scene. Actually, the music scene is the biggest scene division in Russia (and to be honest, in the rest of this godforsaken world as well). Now computers are getting rapidly into the life of people, I-net becomes available to anyone having a modem. Sure it's a good thing, but now anyone can get a tracker and make some bum-tsss-bum-tsss house tracks. And they do. Unfortunatley. Russia is a big country and because of that the amount of lamers is higher than anywhere else. They come out of nowhere and post their 'very cool' tracks everywhere they can find. They found groups and keep making their bum-bum stuff together. They send music to each other and wonder how good it is. I don't mean any harm to all the house/techno people out there, but those guys' tracks are just really horrible and all of them write in techno styles. So, getting back to the topic, there are numerous small groups in the russian scene. And all of them pretend they are making the best stuff ever.

But hey, don't even think about thinking that the Russian music scene is just a bunch of lame DJs. There are many great guys there as well. First of all I would name Tangerine (his musicdisk "Cyber-Shaman" was reviewed in one of the previous Hugi issues). Personally I think he's the most talented composer in the Russian scene. He mainly does trip-hop/mellow, new age/ambient tracks, but among those you can find jungle and jazzy ones. Tangerine's tracks are always very professional and of good quality. Samples are brilliant and very often softsynth generated or sampled by the author himself. Now Tangy is getting off the tracker and moving to professional equipment. Read an interview with him in this Hugi issue.

Next I would name Corpse. He's the best in writing metal tracks in Russia. His tracks are always aggressive and very often experimental. He uses vocals pretty often and in nearly every one of his modules you can find 'Corpse signature guitar samples'. The only one bad thing about Corpse is that some of his tracks are very similiar because of the same samples and the very same sound.

I would also like to mention such great guys as Manwe/Sands, Slightly Magic/Bytefall Group, Treks/Sands, Euggie/Bytefall Group and many, many others but talking about each of them separately would take too much space.

Now I would like to talk about Russian music groups. There are no big tracking labels such as Analogue or KFMF in Russia, but there is SandS - the music group which consists of the best Russian 'mellow' musicians such as Manwe, SnowCat, Tangerine, Treks, Fast Shadow, Real, Tarh etc. They produce music disks regularily and their music is very good. They don't do aggressive tracks - all their music is soft, gentle and calm. I would recommend their "...and all that jazz", "Night tales" and "Feeling synthesized" musicdisks to everyone interested in mellow and jazz music.

One more group that produces quality music is CrystalJungleTeam. They do mainly jungle, bbeat, and d'n'b.

There is also HRg, which is not actually a music group, but they have a lot of talanted musicians among them. Their tracks are usually aggressive, experimental and hold a lot of energy. They release singles regularly and sometimes they compile musicdisks as well.

Moreover, I'd like to tell you about the Bytefall Group (http://www.bfg.org), the organizers of the biggest Russian party, Bytefall. The leading musicians of this group are Slightly Magic - the Russian guitar king -, Euggie and Fast Shadow. It's hard to categorize their music because every track is different. You just have to hear it yourself.

Sure there are many musicians who are not in those groups, me for example (sigh!). The following non-music groups have good musicians among them: T-rex and DDT entertaintment.

The best sources to learn about Russian tracking scene, listen to some Russian modules and get a bunch of Russian music-related links are:

http://trackers.elkatel.ru - for Russian speakers (English version planned),

http://www.sentinel.da.ru - for both Russian and English speakers.

I hope this small article gives you a basic feel of the Russian music scene and that after reading it you get a strong wish to download some Russian songs.

- flux/t-rex