Russendisko Hits (TRIKONT US-0308)
CD in Digipak with detailed Booklet in english and german compiled by: Yuriy Gurzhy & Wladimir Kaminer(Author of the bestsellers "Russendisko", "Schönhauser Allee", "Militärmusik" and "Karaoke")
Also released at Trikont: RUSSENSOUL
The Russian Disco
Over the years more and more Russians have settled in the Berlin district Prenzlauer Berg: painters, writers, musicians, dancers.
One day, I met a musician there called Yuriy Gurzhy. Yuriy had just arrived with his parents from sunny Charkow and, like me, was a passionate music collector. We put our collections together - it was quite impressing. "Let's throw a party and make our Russian music known here", Yuriy suggested. We didn't have to wait too long for the opportunity to come. I was organising a series of events in a Berlin bar "Kaffee Burger" called "The Russian Cell" in an attempt to do away with the cliché of the so called "Russian Soul". The sleazy "Russian Soul" - a typically German invention - had been getting to us for a while now and was making the life of my fellow countrymen miserable. It wasn't easy to live up to this cliché, you know. I had always wanted to do something against it and present people with an alternative Russian culture. So in the context of the events in "Kaffee Burger" three of us organised a Russian Disco ("Russendisko") - Yuriy acted as DJ, my wife Olga cashed up and I messed about here and there and was responsible for making the event known and reporting on it.
Our party wasn't only a great success with the Russian community but also and especially with the locals. Lots of people really enjoyed the weird, unpolished and sometimes awful sounding music but which, in the end, was really good to dance to. Whenever the Russian disco was on the programme, "Kaffee Burger" was bang full at nine p.m. already. From the reports we wrote on "Russendisko" and other stories I wrote, I managed to compile a book I also called "Russendisko". Some papers reported "The 'Russian soul' is finally back in Berlin again" - and from then on, in interviews, I was always had to live up to this cliché.
Wladimir Kaminer
St. Petersburg Times
berlin still has a russian zone
by Sergei Chernov
Twice a month, a motley collection of hundreds of young people gather to spend the night in a little-known club in what used to be East Berlin. The club goers - native Germans, Russian emigres and a handful of tourists from the United States and Europe - go with a common purpose in mind: to listen and dance to recordings of alternative music from the former Soviet Union.
The music runs the gamut of alternative genres, from urban folk to ska punk, but it all comes under the heading Russendisko, or Russian Disco. The disco's all-night parties are held at an art club called Kaffee Burger and organized by emigre DJs Yury Gurdzhi and Vladimir Kaminer. Both Gurdzhi (a sound engineer who several years ago moved to Berlin from Kharkov, Ukraine) and the Moscow-born Kaminer describe themselves as passionate collectors of music.
In addition to being a music-lover and a DJ, Kaminer is a best-selling author in Germany as well. In total, he has penned five German-language books, including "Russendisko," a collection of stories about Russian immigrants in Berlin that sold more than 50,000 copies.
"We've been lucky because we have been the subject of a great deal of publicity because of his [Kaminer's] unique position [as a well-known author]," Gurdzhi said in a telephone interview from his parents' home in Leipzig.
"Kaminer's on television and in the papers all the time, so people come [to the disco] to take a look at him. It's rather an extraordinary combination: He's both an author and a DJ."
The first Russendisko was held in October 1999 at the Kaffee Burger, a historic cafe in the Berlin neighborhood of Mitte, which during the Cold War had a reputation within the East German secret police as a hangout for dissidents.
Despite its name, the disco is not limited to Russian music, including songs by bands from all over the former Soviet Union, including Moldova's Zdob Si Zdub and Ukraine's Vopli Vidoplyasova.
"It's living music, and the main criteria for [the disco] is that we like it," Gurdzhi said. "We've developed a format: We play non-pop music, and we don't play anything we consider bland pop."
"We don't play electronic music either, not because we don't like it, but because it's not our specialty," he said.
According to Gurdzhi, 70 to 80 percent of Russendisko's audience are Germans, with the remainder Americans and a few other Berlin tourists. Although the city boasts a very large Russian community, he said the number of Russians at the gigs is relatively small.
"The thing is, the Russian community has discos of its own," Gurdzhi said. "The emigre population often requires trendier clubs with a lot of gold. ... We don't conform to Russian tastes."
Indeed, what Russendisko offers is something entirely dissimilar to the flashy clubs Gurdzhi mentioned.
"We have a small room that's filled with smoke and usually jam-packed," Gurdzhi said. "Even if you're sweating, there's more drive than at other places."
The Russendisko DJs use downtime between Kaffee Burger events to bring Russian music to other cities, and have toured most of Germany, as well as Austria, Switzerland, Italy and, most recently, the United States.
The "Russendisko Hits" album was released in January on the independent German label Trikont, founded in Munich in 1971 and run by philosophy and political-science graduate Achim Bergmann. What makes a Trikont disc, Bergmann has been quoted as saying, "is intensity and a connection with real life. This is what's left of our political stance. For us music is not just music"
The album includes 16 tracks from Nogu Svelo, Markscheider Kunst, Spitfire, Leningrad, Sveta Kolibaba, Vopli Vidoplyasova, St. Petersburg Ska-Jazz Review and others. St. Petersburg gets more attention than any other city, as seven of the 16 tracks are by local bands.
"It's a compliment to your city as far as music is concerned," said Gurdzhi. "In reality, compared to St. Petersburg, there's not much happening in the rest of [the former U.S.S.R.]."
Though Kaffee Burger can hold no more than 300 patrons, Gurdzhi said that people come and go on Russendisko nights and that there is always a line outside waiting to be admitted. He estimated that between 800 and 1,000 people attend the disco on a single night.
"They dance, dance, dance and drink booze until six in the morning," he said.
What is it about Russian alternative music that Germans find so appealing?
"I think it's the mood we create at the parties," Gurdzhi said. "What you see on the music channels or hear on the radio is so uniform, it's just not living music. You can't find energy like ours anywhere else. Here, things are different."
(www.sptimesrussia.com/archive/times/871/features/a_9500.htm)
Tracklist
1. NOGU SVELO: The Little Chinese Bells [04:12]
2. LEPRIKONSI: Chicks Don't Fall In Love With Me [03:25]
3. MARKSCHEIDER KUNST: The Dance [02:25]
4. RED ELVISES,THE: Cosmonaut Petrov [03:10]
5. SPITFIRE: Rio-Rita [02:02]
6. SDOB SI ZDUB: A Gipsy And A U.F.O. [02:32]
7. LENINGRAD: WWW [02:46]
8. KOLIBABA,SVETA: Hey DJ [02:46]
9. DISTEMPER: Fight For Living [02:39]
10. SOYBELMAN,LEONID: A Guy [02:57]
11. MINOR,LA: A Girl In A Cotton Dress [02:00]
12. 3D: In A Hip Club [02:43]
13. AMSTERDAM KLEZMER BAND: Limonchiki [03:13]
14. VV: You Took The Piss Out Of Me [04:09]
15. ROTFRONT: The Robots [04:35]
16. ST.PETERSBURG SKA-JAZZ REVIEW: Trip Back To Childhood [03:06]
Press Reviews:
Russendisko: Jamie Renton - FRoots
Earlier this year Germany's estimable Trikont label released Globalista, a compilation of fun, trashy 'local music from out there' type stuff from all around the globe. One of the highlights of that compilation came from Russian punky, shouty ska radicals Leningrad. Well here's a whole album of the stuff. [read more]
Russendisko: Other Music - GH
We've been getting a lot of requests for "Russendisko" over the past few months; it's finally here! Four years ago, Russian emigre DJs Yury Gurzhy and Vladmir Kaminer (who is also a best selling author in Germany) began hosting a bi-monthly party in a Berlin bar calling it Russendisko. A night born out of the two's passion of music, the DJs spin records of bands from all over the former Soviet Union which is inclusive to a wide variety of "non-pop" styles -- from punk to ska tofolk to alternative rock. [read more]
Russendisko: John L Walters - The Guardian
"The quirky RussenDisko is a terrific compilation from several Russian bands who attack punk, ska and rock 'n' roll with innocent glee and embarrassingly good musicianship. The music sounds vaguely familiar to anyone who attended beersoaked, sweaty gigs in the late 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, yet everything is strangely different: in Russian, in time, and frequently in tune. [read more]
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