Кооператив Ништяк - Мутабор album flac

KOOPERATIV NISHTYAK "Mutabor"/"Pirate Attack on an Uninhabited Island" Ladies and gentlemen: and now for something completely different.. I wasn't sure if it was worth tackling because, for one, these recordings would be nearly impossible to find outside of the band's country of origin, although some of the later CD's are more accessible in the West. But the music is simply too good, and I decided to yet again indulge my snobbish self despite knowing that, tragically, most people would not get a chance to get their hands on this release. With that disparaging introduction out of the way, I may begin.KN's approximately 25-year (and going) artistic trajectory is quite labyrinthine, as their lengthy discography of Zappa-esque proportions can attest. In the mid-1980's the band floated within a fairway of the existentialist Siberian punk, then spent all of the 1990's shedding their own hardcore DNA via multifarious fusion attempts and excursions into jazz, psychedelia and even Tom Waits-inspired forays, arriving into what had been variously described as Gothic lounge, Alchemist pop and Occult chanson. The band did not stop there and pushed on, eventually landing somewhere on the vast post-industrial grounds but never staying long on any given patch of land, so keeping up with what KN may be up to at the current moment is a daunting task all in itself. Until recently, the band counted among its members violinist Eugene Voronovsky - known to the industrial music fans for his project CISFINITUM. But KN's only constant always remained the principal songwriter, lyricist and front-man Kirill Rybjakov, with his inexhaustible bag of tricks and obsessions in tow.Since their lyrics are exclusively in Russian, I'd like to give at least some idea as to what kind of world KN dwell in. The band always strived for transcendence and even during their earlier punk days managed to stay apart from their brethren by being eccentric and introverted. Album titles like "The Black Mass or Freddy Krueger's Fan Club", "A Wreath on Dionysus' Pale Forehead" or "Music For The Lonely Nazi Women or Magical Power of Art" showed this group's perceptions to be far removed from just about all of their peers, as good as some of them were - KN's now-departed long-time drummer and multi-instrumentalist Alexander Andryushkin was also a drummer for the Russian punk legends GRAZHDANSKAYA OBORONA. Later on, Rybjakov himself dabbled fully into all things occult and esoteric but channeled them very differently from most black and death metal bands or even apocalyptic folk luminaries like CURRENT 93, endowing his texts with surrealist, tongue-in-cheek sense of humor (for example, one of his lyrical shticks back in a day was placing cultural/historical figures - poets, painters, high ranking Nazi officials - as well as various literary and mythological characters in totally absurdist situations) and erecting a "fantastique" world beyond the looking glass. At the same time, the concept of protest so vital to punk still remained intact no matter what period of the band's activity one would look at. Unlike the banal, depreciated socio-political bellyaching, however, it became exquisitely metaphysical in KN's hands, often resembling poetic annotations to some utterly bizarre, surrealistic tableaux and canvases, where real meaning was to be found in the tiny spaces in between these abstract conglomerations. Much of KN's discography, by the way, is released or reissued on the band's own label Zamogilye (http://zamogilye.lenin.ru/) but is usually very limited, so many albums may still sadly be out of reach. As for the disc I picked for this write-up, it somewhat serves this domain's intents and purposes, because it combines two earlier albums from KN's punk heydays, both of which in reality reach quite deep into hardcore-jazz fusion and crossover thrash-punk territories."Mutabor" from 1992 was probably the pinnacle of Rybjakov's toying with the Nazi themes. Lyrically, the album unbelievably shrewdly gallops though the entire spectrum of Nazi paraphernalia that is married to alcohol-addled philosophical observations and filtered through an existentialist prism and literary symbolism in a manner that no Oi/RAC/NSBM band ever dreamt of. Aryan mythology and the black magic, military parades and gas chambers, Bavaria and Nuremberg - the full circle, on the course of which the author by turns jumps out of his shell of a street-punk romantic from a distant Siberian town right into the shoes of everyone, from Horst Wessel to Buchenwald victims to tortured children in the basements of SD to uncle Adolf's soul that cannot find peace. Musically, the album is equally brilliant, although recorded exclusively by the Rybjakov/Andryushkin tandem. One thing to note would be the nature of the sound and riffs, which have so much less to do with the casual punk slipshodness but more with thoughtful and sturdy confluence of essentially gothic post-punk and lean metallic flair, punctuated by Andryushkin's immaculate drumming, which also has more to do with metal, prog and jazz than with any punk forbearers. Speaking of jazz, the band do a pretty amazing job of blending in jazzy keyboards, harpsichords, organ solos and synth choirs next to smoothly skewed, rhythmic hardcore speed bursts and chiseled, sculptured riffs. Songs themselves are all amazingly memorable, consummate pieces of instrumentation, conceived and built with an almost surgical precision. Whether it's the unbridled, in-your-face numbers like "Horst Wessel", "Alchemy" or "Swastika", slow Gothic anthem "Buchenwald", veritable jazz-punk boogie of "Oświęcim" or the militant, marching tread of "Bavaria" - really all of them transcend punk and hardcore while simultaneously maintaining their formal appearance. The same, though, cannot be said of the album's crowning jewel, the magnificent 10-minute long psychedelic suite "Carnival" (a wistful, paradoxically lyrical, paean to a God rejected), which really is better off heard than talked about. Last thing to note is the presence of sampled WWII German marches all over the place, which of course, unlike the regular NSBM stuff, carry a rather sarcastic meaning on an album of such broad scope."Pirate Attack on an Uninhabited Island" dates back to 1989, when KN had a full line-up of four members. Reversed, stylistic lineage with relation to "Mutabor" is more than apparent here, what with the instantly recognizable sound, though lacking the fully grown, detached gothic underlining of its successor. Jazz injections are nowhere to be found, since the band only started to experiment with keyboards (as a few short segments on a couple of tracks demonstrate), and some of the faster tracks may carry a comparatively straightforward hardcore bearing at first, but that's only on the surface. What KN did was produce a hardcore album as if it was written by punk musicians who clandestinely, at night, away from their friends, listen to prog-rock. Moreover, they insist on keeping it a secret as opposed to yelling about it in the middle of a busy street. The execution here is perfect in a manner that seems to almost be an oxymoron when being described: aggression and simplicity of hardcore meet the intellectual posturing of prog minus the vexatious side-effects of both (such as indulgent, exaggerated technical and structural grandiloquence of one and obtuse, obstinate tunnel vision of the other). Just as with "Mutabor", each track is a totally self-sustained piece, with its own set of precisely shaped chords and riffs, adjusted rhythm base and incredibly diverse, memorable song writing - as if the band took up a handful of complex ideas, split them into short punk pieces and honed each of them to utter perfection. Every song works its way around only one single theme, but each one is worth its weight in gold. Many of these pieces, particularly those of slow to mid-paced variety ("Wind", "Heat", "Sad Song", "Ruin") fit into the punk cannon with visible difficulty, due to the unorthodox rhythmic foundations of both the music and vocals, despite the sound that very much meets the stylistic criteria. Meanwhile the fastest numbers ("Rock-n-Horn", "Right of Birth, "Bespredel", "F.K.F.K.", "Ghost") are impeccable instances of thrash and punk cross-pollination (i.e. thrashcore) of the highest order, and possibly for those exact above stated reasons. In fact, in one of the interviews Andryushkin actually cited CRYPTIC SLAUGHTER as an influence for that time period. Taking into account the fact that Russian rock was perpetually behind its Western older brother, having a Siberian band release such fresh and novel creation at a time when the Berlin Wall barely went down is particularly endearing. Lyrically, unlike "Mutabor", the record is without a specifically unifying concept and jumps around all over the place, perhaps in a kind of transitional manner, but Rybjakov's poetic talent remains very much intact and spot-on, as he moves swiftly and manages to cover a hell of a lot of ground. There is your biting and funny social commentary of "Right of Birth" or "Rock-n-Horn", gritty and simultaneously poetic observations of urban, philosophical romanticism by way of alcoholic delirium in "Zh.D.", "Trans-hippy-an Punk" or "F.K.F.K.". You also get a global existentialist perspective of "Ruin", a cynical, pseudo-Gothic workout "Sad Song", fatalistic punk ballad "No Future" and ruthless yet touching punk-hippy hymn "Land of the Infinite Summer" (which supports the concept of punks being a bunch of hippies with various levels of aggressiveness). And, as a cherry on top, Rybjakov throws in several outright bizarre, metaphysical, epistolary portraits on "Forever", "Heat" or "Abstraction" that give very clear indications of the lyrical shape of things to come.To wrap this up somehow, I'll just stress that while I spent a good amount of space discussing the lyrics, the music on both of these albums (if I did not make it obvious enough) speaks volumes whether the language barrier is breached or not. Both recordings were re-mastered in the late 1990's and unfortunately reissued only via this limited edition of one hundred copies. Some years later Zamogilye re-released them separately but with similarly miniscule pressing, so downloading this stuff is regrettably your best bet. Good luck to all of you in your noble quest.