Ilia Rogatchevski

When I was ten years old, I purchased a little transistor radio. It was cheap and small enough to fit into my pocket. Although I was slightly embarrassed by its pink plastic casing, this thing kept me company on my thirty-minute walk to and from school. I remember taking the radio out with me to the playground one day and turning it on in. Each station, it seemed, was preoccupied with transmitting the same news. I didn’t know what the World Trade Centre was at that point, but the magnitude of what had just happened dawned on me very quickly.

In the 1970s, William Basinski sat in his Brooklyn loft making tape loops. His radio antenna was powerful enough to capture transmissions from the Empire State Building. These broadcasts relayed muzak cover versions of American popular standards. Basinski recorded them, capturing ethereal snippets on magnetic tape. This was sampling before such a concept really existed. Knowing that these recordings were good, but not yet having the confidence to use them in their own right, the classically trained composer boxed them up.

In the early 2000s, when Basinski finally came around to digitising the loops, he discovered that the tape had degraded to such an extent that bits of it would flake off every time it passed the tape head. This meant that the recordings would slowly disintegrate as they were being played and soon became ghostly versions of their former selves.

On the morning of 9/11, Basinski rushed up to the roof of his building and watched the second plane hit the South Tower. As the smoke billowed, he turned on The Disintegration Loops and listened. Beautiful, haunting melodies swelled up around him, mapping their own decomposition. They were at once both hopelessly melancholic and surprisingly resilient. 

Sebastian Melmoth l-r: Laura Michelle Smith, Peter Jordan, Ilia Rogatchevski, Tomoko Matsumoto. Photo: Artem Barkhin.

Sebastian Melmoth has seen various stages of activity since I established the project back in 2006. Intended to operate as a conceptual antithesis to popular music, to begin with, the group existed in name only. At the time, I was mildly obsessed with the life and work of Oscar Wilde and, upon discovering that Wilde took up the pseudonym of Sebastian Melmoth during his self-imposed exile in France (1897-1900), decided to call my imaginary band in his honour. 

The name is referential. It is a combination of Saint Sebastian and Melmoth the Wanderer. The former was an icon for the underground gay community in Victorian England and the latter, a Gothic novel by Wilde’s great-uncle Charles Robert Maturin, first published in 1820. Due to his own castigation by polite society, it is likely that Wilde greatly empathised with both Saint Sebastian’s martyrdom and Maturin’s central antagonist (a man who takes to wandering the Earth after selling his soul to the Devil in return for immortality). 

The literary nature of Sebastian Melmoth was the project’s founding principle. The first few years were littered with attempts at writing sincere songs that pointed towards literary hallmarks. Sunshine Blues, for example, namedrops Rodion Raskolnikov, the anguished protagonist of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime & Punishment (1866), while Manskinner references a peripheral character from Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1994). 

This way of working was typical for us. Books were read in parallel to the creation of the music, lyrics and visual artwork. Each activity informed the other, creating a fluid symbiotic network of overlapping information. Like is often said of Sonic Youth, I wanted Sebastian Melmoth to operate as an obscure gateway drug to other works of literature, pop culture and art with each release having a tight conceptual idea supporting it.  

Sebastian Melmoth began life in earnest as a high school four-piece, with myself on rhythm guitar and vocals, Miranda Collett on lead guitar, Joe Dibb on keys and Elias Razak on drums. Peter Jacobs replaced Elias after a while, but before long the group downsized to an acoustic anti-folk duo in the vein of the Moldy Peaches. The underlying theme of our debut album, Insanity’s Insanity (self-released, 2010), was the absurd nature of everyday reality. This is evidenced by the title, which was lifted out of Eugène Ionesco’s 1959 play Rhinoceros.

While looking for a job on Gumtree, I came across a psychedelic indie outfit called Clinker (at that time a quartet, but now a duo consisting of Peter Jordan and Tomoko Matsumoto). They were advertising for extras to cast in their new music video So We Say (Dir. Ambrose Yalley, 2009). We became friends and eventually started making music together. They produced Insanity’s Insanity and even remixed a few of the tracks from that album, but our collaboration didn’t realise its full potential until a little later.

Sebastian Melmoth - Sunshine Blues (DTT Mix)

Our next releases, In der Tiefe (self-released, 2011) and The Nausea of Being (self-released, 2012), were at the same time more ambitious and conceptual than our first long player. Pointing their fingers at the works of Carl Jung and Jean-Paul Sartre respectively, these companion albums broadly concerned themselves with existentialism. In der Tiefe (German, in the depths) took drug psychosis as its principal theme. Not unlike Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void (2009) the central protagonist uses psychedelic drugs to delve deep into the rabbit hole of his psyche in an attempt to capture and control his ‘shadow self’. The German title was appropriated from Fritz Lang’s silent sci-fi classic Metropolis (1927) and, in its original context, referred to the bottom level of the titular tiered city: the domicile of the working classes.

The Nausea of Being expanded on these ideas, rising, as it were, from the depths and surfacing on a desolate landscape of social destitution, political corruption, alcoholism, murder and religious dogma. Sartre, Albert Camus and Samuel Beckett all greatly influenced me around this time. I remember reading Sarte’s 1938 novel Nausea, where the narrator experienced crippling anxiety in the face of everyday interactions, and thinking that his experiences were not far from my own. Tracks such as Waiting for Godot, Paintstripper Blues and Godemiché echoed the work of the authors above and attempted to illustrate what I saw, at the time, as the core elements of the human condition: alienation, despair, lust, self-destruction. 

Peter programmed the drums, played bass and, along with Tomoko, pretty much moulded our sound on these two albums, but the next couple of years saw a period of transition, both in terms of lineup and musical direction. Laura Michelle Smith joined us on drums, adding much needed rhythmic power to the live band dynamic, while Miranda left a short time after that to pursue other interests. Her parting contributions can be heard on Emetophobia (self-released, 2013). This eight-track EP was recorded entirely on GarageBand using drum presets and the inbuilt laptop mic for live instrumentation. Stylistically drawing from Atlas Sound’s Bedroom Databank series and the Brian Jonestown Massacre’s more lo-fi output, Emetophobia is still one of my favourite Sebastian Melmoth albums. The lyrics may be a touch naive and the sound imperfect, but these elements contribute to the album’s overall charm. 

Being now in the business of making difficult music we found a couple of labels sympathetic to our way of thinking. After listening to an unsolicited copy of The Nausea of Being, Thomas Martin Ekelund commissioned us to compose thirty minutes of new music for his tape label. The result was In Ruins (Beläten, 2014), which is probably our best and most consistent work. It was described in one review as sounding “like a Britpop version of the Velvet Underground filtered through everything rock saw during the 70s, 80s and 90s”. 

Sebastian Melmoth - Miet Mitzvah

While on the surface In Ruins may appear to be a breakup album, at its core, it is actually a complex study of fanaticism, personality cults and terrorism. Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry’s account of the Manson Family murders, Helter Skelter (1974), and Stefan Aust’s The Baader-Meinhof Complex (1985) both fed into the album’s sense of isolation. The latter book, which recounted the history of the Red Army Faction - a far-left West German militant organisation - was particularly influential. 

After becoming increasingly fascinated with their story, I rechristened each of us after the main Baader-Meinhof members: Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin & Jan-Carl Raspe. At concerts we wore all black, save for a red armband adorned with an inverted white triangle, and performed theatrical psychedelic noise rock to the general bewilderment of all. While playing Wrong Side of the Sun, for example, I would typically invade the crowd and strangle myself with the microphone cable. This performance had roots in Viennese Actionism, but also functioned as an extension of Guy Debord’s push for the Construction of Situations. What we were trying to say was that all forms of fanaticism are dangerous, irrespective of their ideological origins, but I’m not certain whether this came across particularly well. 

By this time we were regularly rehearsing in a garage underneath the A104 in east London. It was a cold, dark and unforgiving place. Apparently, the space had been an illicit marijuana farm before it became a rehearsal room. With notable latency, this knowledge trickled down to the local gangsters and the garage was broken into on a few occasions. Finding nothing but piles of cheap guitars, broken amplifiers and no marijuana our new friends left the place alone, but not before holding our besieged landlord up at knifepoint. Tensions in the band were also on the rise. Laura and myself were becoming more interested in musique concrète, graphic scores and improvisation, while Peter didn’t like this new direction at all, feeling that our strengths lay in songwriting and the traditional band dynamic. 

It was against this background that our last two full length albums were recorded: Felix Culpa (OKVLT, 2015) and Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta (Must Die Records, 2016). We worked on these projects in parallel in an attempt to appease our diverging interests. 

Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta is a garage rock record that nodded to our punk rock influences while also including elements of surf, psych and noise. The record title is a reference to a council of Senior Aboriginal Women from the town of Coober Pedy, South Australia who protested against the Australian government dumping radioactive waste on their land. Coober Pedy, which translates from the local Aboriginal language as “white man’s hole”, is not only famous for its opal, but also the fact that many of its residents live underground to escape the scorching daytime heat. Having spent our fair share of time writing music underground, we felt companionship with these people. Peter wanted an accurate reflection of the band as a live unit and, I suppose, the album manages to achieve that (some of the drum tracks were actually multitrack recordings from our concerts). The production is far from perfect, but the energy is there, which, in the context of a garage rock album, is probably more important than fidelity. 

Sebastian Melmoth - Rooftop Surfing

Felix Culpa (Latin, happy fall) took on a slightly different approach. The majority of these songs were created during intense and heated sessions. Improvisation played a key role in its construction, but so did William Burroughs style cut-ups, digital manipulations and field recordings. At its heart, Felix Culpa explored the nature of the Fall: a condition of living in a permanent state of exposure; of opening oneself up to the Other. According to Slavoj Žižek, "the ultimate Event is the Fall itself, the loss of some primordial unity and harmony which never existed, which is just a retroactive illusion" (Event, 2014). Just like Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta, this project also served to reflect what the band was at that particular moment in time: fractured, vulnerable and on the brink of disbanding. The album cover shows Gerhard Halbritter’s photograph of Andreas Baader’s death mask, which hints to the viewer that the creative drive behind Sebastian Melmoth had largely ceased to operate. 

Each of our studio releases aimed to depart from the last. Not repeating ourselves was another key principle of the band. Towards the end, however, I began to feel that we were doing just that. I also felt that my songwriting had become contrived and breaking out of that mould was not an option supported by everyone. Additionally, I became uncomfortable with some of the characters in my lyrics. Songs such as Prosopagnosia or Foedi Oculi employ elements of sexism, sadism, oppression and violence in order to highlight the abhorrence of such actions. Even though I saw the explorations of these themes as a contemporary take on Maturin’s gothic horror, as time went on, it became increasingly difficult for me to justify them. 

Our last show was at a tiny Clapton bar called Biddle Bros, in the summer of 2017. In my opinion, the show went better than expected. At that point we hadn’t rehearsed much or played live in a while. Peter disagreed. He felt that we lost something crucial along the way. Where once we had been theatrical, now we were just plodding along. I wasn’t convinced. Theatre is an open-ended format that can allow for modest gestures as well as flamboyant ones. We were coming from different directions and refusing to meet each other halfway. Peter was citing David Bowie and I was referencing Fluxus and Bertolt Brecht. At its core, this argument - not our first or last, but certainly our most public one - was saturated by our personal and professional expectations of one another. These expectations weren’t always met and neither of us were open to what the other person wanted. Whatever odd bits we had recorded around this time were self-released as an outtakes compilation called Devotional Songs for the Digital Age, in late 2018.

Not long after all of this, Olf van Elden aka Interstellar Funk reached out with a proposal to compile our more electronic cuts together on vinyl. We christened this new album The Dynamics of Vanity (Artificial Dance, 2019). The title is both a comment on culture's obsession with rehashing the past - the subject matter of Simon Reynolds's book Retromania (2010) - and our own personal navel-gazing. The title references a collage I had made as an art student that mocked the fashion industry's depiction of male underwear models. To my mind, they resembled intricate amphorae paintings and Hellenistic bronzes of Greek antiquity.

Sebastian Melmoth - Icarus

Although The Dynamics of Vanity is not a studio album, we approached its production with the same attention to detail as we would any other record. For the cover, we wanted to get across the stark, archaic beauty of the human body in motion. Stripped, Rammstein’s appropriation of Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938) was the main reference point, but so too were Andy Stott’s album covers, namely Luxury Problems and Too Many Voices. After some initial back and forth, the Amsterdam-based Australian designer Steele Bonus rendered these ideas in a post-punk fashion suited to our sound and aesthetic.    

As we dug through our hard drives compiling the album, we unearthed a few unreleased remixes made by Peter and Tomoko. We decided to weave these rediscovered tracks into a new project, Imaginary Futures (MFZ Records, 2020), a record that reimagined our back catalogue as a suite of rave-ready dancefloor fillers.  

While the album title, which alludes to the lost potential of disparate creative outcomes, was borrowed from Richard Barbrook’s 2007 book charting the emergence of the internet, it was the production, remix and DJ work of Andrew Weatherall that was the key inspiration for the our approach. The album’s flow and concept loosely mirrors Weatherall’s treatment of Primal Scream’s source material for Screamadelica, which itself resulted in their pivotal marriage of rock and acid house. The idea for the album was set before Weatherall’s passing, but his departure helped to calcify the direction of the mix. 

Musically, our last two albums are pretty cohesive, despite the fact that they are both compilations and the material on them isn’t strictly new. They are collections of snapshots, taken over our decade-long recording history, that are bridged together by new contexts. The Dynamics of Vanity was curated by Olf and the bulk of Imaginary Futures was remixed by Peter and Tomoko, and my personal contributions to these projects was limited to administrative tasks, design and artwork consultation. That being said, they are fair representations of who we were: not ‘Best Ofs’ or ‘Worst Ofs’, but ‘Sort Ofs’. 

Sebastian Melmoth - Accidentally Grotesque (DTT Mix)

Much like the albums described above, this essay is merely a rendering of our story and far from the whole picture. The text is not intended to be canonical. Many events, people and releases have been omitted for the benefit of readability. What I hope the text does is provide some background of our origins, processes and motivations.  

As mentioned before, we haven’t played live or recorded anything new since 2017 and I doubt that we will do either of those things again. After fourteen years of nurturing the same idea, it has come to a point where I have said everything there is to say in this particular format. I have enjoyed developing this band with my many friends, and seeing it change over the years, but it’s finally time for us all to move on to other projects and for Sebastian Melmoth to cease his aimless wandering. 

The Dynamics of Vanity is out now on Artificial Dance. Imaginary Futures is available via MFZ Records. Follow Sebastian Melmoth on Facebook and Instagram.

My sound piece ‘Broken Hard Drive’ has been featured on the online sound gallery The Thames Submarine. 

It is a contact mic recording of an external hard drive, which had once stored my library of field recordings. The sound that you hear is the drive attempting to boot itself up. It is the rhythmic sound of corrupted data. 

You can find the piece below and don’t forget to listen to an interview with me talking about it here.

L-R: Jonas Golland, Cos Chapman, David Gadsdon, Gardyloo Spew. Photo courtesy of the band.

I am Meat was formed by Jonas Golland and Kazuya Ohtani as part of their university project in 2011. David Gadsdon, who was moonlighting as a stand-up comedian at the time, was drafted in to front the band. While Golland and Ohtani composed the frenetic music, Gadsdon’s lyrics underpinned the songs by constructing elaborate narratives populated by abhorrent protagonists. On stage, the frontman would embody these characters by dressing up in various costumes and delivering the vocals in a confrontational style. 

When Ohtani moved back to Japan, the band continued to operate, with Gardyloo Spew (SPeW) joining on alto saxophone and Cos Chapman (Rude Mechanicals, An Infernal Contraption) on bass. The shifting lineup saw the band move away from the theatrical cabaret that defined them in the beginning to the queasy jazz-punk outfit they later became. While Spew’s riffs gave the songs a new melodious edge, Chapman’s bass worked hard to ground Golland’s flitting drumming. Having no guitar opened up the mid-range and ensured that Gadsdon’s lyrics took centre stage.

The band finally disbanded in 2014, citing exhaustion as the principal cause for their demise. Luckily, their experiments in punk, jazz and cabaret were committed to tape. Six years later, I am Meat’s eponymous debut finally sees the light of day. Like their live shows, the album exudes a sense of paranoid urgency where the vocals, rhythm section and saxophone conspire to reflect our chaotic world. Ilia Rogatchevski caught up with the band to examine their motivations.

The band broke up back in 2014, why release the record now or even at all?

Jonas Golland: Better late than never seems a veritable excuse, but we feel the album is worth it. This was the release that captured most of the songs of the four members. It was also the highest quality and, in the early noughties, production values dwarfed the urgency. Recorded music is a wafer these days. One touch-up of vocals or saxophone levels leads to another, until our release show had no actual album. We hoped no one would notice. 

David Gadsdon: With the rise of streaming, albums aren’t given as much prominence in the digital world as they once were. I longed for this to be the record it is, because, in my mind, this collection of songs shares similar thematic concerns. Most of them were played at our first gig and it felt like a betrayal to leave any of them behind. The bottom line is that it’s so good to finish something and set it free. It draws a line under what you’ve done and allows it to live a life of its own.

I am Meat started off as a trio called The Protagonists of David Gadsdon. Can you tell us more about the early days? 

DG: I was doing a monthly stand up gig at the Boogaloo pub in north London in 2009. Jonas came to see me perform. I didn’t meet him until I was outside. He started saying my name over and over in order to memorise it. It was a disturbing encounter. From there I was invited to do some improv recordings with him, which I had never done before, to pieces of his pre-recorded music. They were much more comedy sketches and jazzy lyrics than songs, but the intention of making each a different character was still embedded in the concept of the band at that time. 

Flash forward to 2011. Jonas had decided, based on our recording sessions, to put together a band as part of his dissertation at university. I was probably the natural choice to do it with, as was Kazuya Ohtani, who was living and studying with Jonas at the time. By this point the music started to edge towards spoken word songs with a cabaret influence to them, like Kurt Weill or The Dresden Dolls. 

JG: As a trio we debuted at the Kings Head, Acton, to an unsuspecting student crowd from Tech Music Schools. The good response was played down by professor Simon Carter: “It's a bit niche, innit?”

Who are these characters that you mention and how do they manifest themselves in the music?

DG: A mulch of people. Some of them are fictional like ‘The New Growth’, some are based on people I know. Others are takes on famous people, like Walter Sickert in ‘Mr. Nemo’. There's a part of me in all the characters, although I draw a line with associating myself with the truly awful ones. 

Some of your characters express chauvinistic tendencies. ‘Mr Nemo’ is certainly one. Having had a prolonged break between the writing and publication of these songs, how do you reflect on their content in 2020?

DG: I’m glad you’ve brought this up. It’s been on my mind a lot. Post #MeToo, there is a lot of focus on men doing grossly inappropriate, if not actually immoral, things. I can’t help but reframe the way I see the characters in that context. There is definitely a lot of toxic masculinity in some of them; Mr. Nemo is downright diabolical and I had to stop performing him live because I hated the character. My focus was to puff up the characters and then deconstruct their machismo.

The lyrical content of ‘Teenage Sluts’ suggests that the protagonist is male, but the song is written and sung by a woman. Is there more to this song than carnivalesque inversion of traditional gendered perspectives?

Gardyloo Spew: The perspective inversion came from an angered place somewhere in the depths of my mind. Some have interpreted the lyrics as an anti-feminist attack when in fact it is the complete opposite. At the time of writing, I had a friend who was a heavy porn abuser and this triggered me very strongly. The reaction I had had come from my own past experiences of being objectified and abused. I wanted to attempt to understand the state of mind of the abuser.

Corrupted states of mind seem to be one of the principal themes on this album. Do you still see the individual as inherently corruptible? 

DG: I think the temptation of corruption is evident in everyone’s life. Being in certain positions makes you more prone to it. The rich and powerful are bound to fall prey to corruption more easily, because they are trying to protect the hierarchical systems that give them such exclusive privilege. The burden they place on the people beneath them creates an additional temptation to give in to whatever dubious ethical or moral failing they may feel seduced by. That does not mean you cannot fight against it. 

I certainly wouldn’t say that we are in a better place now than when I wrote the songs. What with the increase in police brutality against black people, the trampling of queer rights and the inequalities between the genders, it seems we are in a much worse place than before. These systems can’t help but fail us, because one size does not fit all. The challenge of maintaining your individual integrity is as strong a fight as it’s ever been. But you can choose that path and you can decide to do the right thing. 

‘I am Meat’ is out now on Ex Gratia. Follow I am Meat on Facebook and Instagram.

I've been producing music, along with various collaborators, under the name Sebastian Melmoth since 2006. This autumn, we'll be releasing our first vinyl LP - The Dynamics of Vanity - on the Amsterdam-based label Artificial Dance. It's a compilation of our more electronic cuts. The physical album is due to see the light of day on 28 October 2019. Read on for the press release.

Since forming in 2006 post-punk experimentalists Sebastian Melmoth have been on a thoughtful and adventurous musical journey. In a constant state of aural evolution, the London-based four-piece has a delivered a string of albums and EPs that variously touch on everything from garage-rock, grunge and lo-fi pop, to electro, new wave, dark ambient and music concrete, all the while drawing on a myriad of literary and artistic influences.

The band’s first release for Artificial Dance digs deep into their admirable and eye-opening catalogue and draws together some of the Amsterdam-based label’s favourites from the more electronic end of the band’s output. Entitled “The Dynamics of Vanity” – a comment on Western culture’s obsession with rehashing the past and the band’s own in-built distrust of artistic naval-gazing – the set is not a ‘best of’ retrospective but rather a ‘sort of’ selection of stylistically interconnected cuts that gives a very specific snapshot of the band’s work.

Photo: Artem Barkhin

Check for example “Icarus”, a drowsy, hypnotic and sample-laden soundscape that effortlessly joins the dots between post-rock, pitched-down electronica and early morning ambient, or the slowly unfurling throb of thought-provoking opener “The Engineering of Consent”, a swelling, melancholic post-jazz meditation on propaganda and governmental mind control featuring spoken word samples from William S Burroughs in conversation with Brion Gysin, Timothy Leary, Les Levine and Robert Anton Wilson.

The showcased songs are typically hard-to-pin-down, too, with the re-imagined gothic horror break-up cut “Prosopagnosia’ and slow-burn audio addition of “Waiting For Godot” being joined by the wide-eyed morning dream-pop hallucinations of “Seeds (Descent Into Decadence)”. It all adds up to a collection that expertly showcases one engaging thread – of many – running through Sebastian Melmoth’s esoteric body of work.

The festival Radio Revolten 2016 and the book “30 Days of Radio Art” reclaim FM radio as an open-access medium for cultural use. “30 Days of Radio Art” covers the presented artworks and daily events of Radio Revolten alongside contemporary thinking by radio activists and artists on the current and future use of their material and medium of choice. Laura and I performed at the festival thanks to a Resonance FM x Jerwood Arts grant. Our contribution is documented on pages 205-6.

EDITED BY: Knut Aufermann, Helen Hahmann, Sarah Washington, and Ralf Wendt WITH ADDITIONAL CONTRIBUTIONS BY: Xentos Fray Bentos, Anna Friz, Hartmut Geerken, Lucinda Guy, Martin Hartung, Lukas Holfeld, Udo Israel, Miuki Jokiranta, Tina Klatte, Jan Langhammer, Sophea Lerner, Michael Nicolai, Gabi Schaffner, Helen Thein, Nina Westermann, Gregory Whitehead, Florian Wüst, Elisabeth Zimmermann, et al. PHOTOGRAPHY: Marcus-Andreas Mohr GRAPHIC DESIGN: Nastia Bessarabova

Every now and again I like to make drones and release them online. Here's one I made earlier. The Prime Directive is a sound collage compiled from various sleep aids native to YouTube.

Many YouTube channels are dedicated to uploading long-form drones to help people with tinnitus, anxiety and/or insomnia. These recordings can vary from idling engine noises and shopping centre muzak to pop songs slowed down by 800%.

Often looped for up to twelve hours, and sampled from films, tv shows and other pop culture sources, these found sounds are analogous to videos published by the ASMR community.

Originally composed as a two-hour long piece for Resonance EXTRA, this thirty-minute distillation was made in preparation for a sound art concert I performed last year.

Trupa Trupa by Michal Szlaga. From left: Rafał Wojczal, Wojtek Juchniewicz, Tomek Pawluczuk, Grzegorz Kwiatkowski

Ilia Rogatchevski catches up with the Polish quartet’s front man to discuss Gdansk’s tumultuous history, the films of Werner Herzog and the importance of boredom to the creative process

Trupa Trupa are an art rock band from Gdansk. Fusing elements of post-hardcore, no wave and psychedelia, the four-piece exude a restless energy that bears the hallmarks of Fugazi’s uncompromising punk ethos. Fronted by the poet Grzegorz Kwiatkowski, the band weave absurd lyrics through liquifying guitar riffs, angular bass lines and concise percussion. Repetition plays a key role in their work, as is evidenced by their playful band name, which roughly translates to a troupe of corpses.

Trupa Trupa released their first two albums Headache and Jolly New Songs, through independent labels Blue Tapes and ici d'ailleurs. Both records received international praise. In his Quietus review of the band’s debut, Wire contributor Tristan Bath called Headache ”their first moment of true greatness”.

On the 26 February the band announced that they had signed to Sub Pop, whose label head Jonathan Poneman revealed that he thinks of the band “as a thunderstorm with big gusts, explosions and torrential downpours”. He made the decision to sign them three years ago, but, he says, “it took me a long time to get it done”. Coinciding with the news, Trupa Trupa released the brand new track “Dream About”, with an accompanying video by Norwegian artist Benjamin Finger.

Ilia Rogatchevski: Congratulations on signing to Sub Pop. How did it happen?

Grzegorz Kwiatkowski: Jonathan Poneman, the boss of Sub Pop, was at our gig at OFF Festival in Katowice. He enjoyed the gig and suggested that he would like to work with us. That was six years ago. Through the years we were working hard, but we weren’t working for Sub Pop or anyone else. Of course, we were curious. We knew that it could happen.

The breaking point was when we played SXSW in 2018. The gig was in a small Irish pub. David Fricke from Rolling Stone was there and Robin Hilton from NPR. All these important people came and my amp broke. I asked the stage manager if he had something else, but he didn’t. Suddenly, one person from the audience said: “I’ve got an amp I can give you.”

In 20 minutes we played songs which should be played in 35. The fastest concert ever. We were so angry. Everything was going wrong. The bass player’s guitar stopped working. We kept on playing, but he was shouting with his guitar over his head. These journalists thought: Woah, man! What a band. They are crazy. We are lucky to have strange accidents working on our side.

Is the band a conduit for accidents, then?

We are really open to mistakes. We love absurdity and paradoxes. The band seem a bit dark, but we love to act like clowns. We just wrote many songs with our producer (Michał Kupicz), but we really don’t know if they will be accessible. Let’s see.

“Dream About”

Benjamin Finger directed the music video for your new song “Dream About”. How did that collaboration come about?

We played with him at a great gig in Cafe Oto in London and became friends. The video looks like hipster stuff from the internet, but it’s his own tapes. We love this kind of atmosphere. It’s very important for us that we are not pretending to be a professional rock band, which makes a professional video. We were afraid that Sub Pop would tell us what to do. Of course, we were wrong. They are totally open to this kind of DIY art.

In a previous interview you suggested that the “spiritual strategy of DIY” is important to the band. Can you define what you mean by that?

You can feel it inside the music that it’s not a PR project. The important thing about Trupa Trupa is that [our] albums are a bit boring. I like to be bored. Our new songs remind me of the atmosphere from Samuel Beckett. Samuel Beckett’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The time is running. We are waiting. We are observing. It’s a meditative, pessimistic thing.

Samuel Beckett’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I like that. In the past you’ve cited The Beatles as a core influence. They were very forward thinking for their time, but are now so canonised that we no longer consider them to be experimental. With that in mind, what sets you apart from other guitar bands working today?

Bands as we are, they don’t exist, because they break up after one or two years. But we exist and are more established than ever. Quite unique, I think, is that we are very democratic in our vision. Every one of us has a strong personality. One is a painter, the second one is a graphic designer, the third a poet, the fourth a reporter and a photographer. Every one of us is trying to put his view inside of the band. It’s kind of a competition. We don’t want to [exist] for the audience. The most important thing is ourselves. I know that sounds narcissistic, but we are friends and this music comes from our friendship.

You guys are based in Gdansk. Have you always been there?

We all live in Gdansk, but not all of us were born here. Tomek Pawluczuk [drums] and Wojciech Juchniewicz [bass] came here from Białystok and Skarżysko-Kamienna, respectively, for studies at the Academy of Fine Arts. Me and Rafał Wojczal [keyboard, guitar] are friends from the same neighbourhood. This is our city and I think that it’s got some impact on us, even if we don’t want it. It’s a very special place, for sure.

What aspects of it seep into your work?

It is the history. Gdansk is connected to the Second World War, to the movement of Solidarity. For me, the place called Westerplatte – the place where the war started – was the dream place for a child. It was like a video game.

There is a mixture of many things in the air still. It’s a really horrifying place, even. For example, a few weeks ago our mayor [Paweł Adamowicz] was murdered. The whole of Poland is in big shock. Gdansk is the city of transgression. Big things are still happening here.

There is also big, great nature around us. We love these landscapes. All of us love Werner Herzog movies, for example. It’s a bit connected to the German aesthetic, I guess. On the other hand, we have our inner landscapes and stories, which are not so connected to the city.

It’s interesting that you mention Herzog. In a previous interview you said that “Jolly New Songs” was a Fitzcarraldo moment for you: the band building an opera house in the middle of the rainforest.

Brian Fitzgerald, the main character of Fitzcarraldo, is a hero for me in the same way as Don Quixote. I’d like to be someone and achieve something, but after all I’m a loser. Every day I wake up and think I will be a better man. It’s not that I would like to be the Übermensch. I would like to be a good man, but I would also like to be a good artist who is constructing his strange ideas and objects.

Listening to “Dream About”, I would compare it to another Herzog film: Lesson Of Darkness (1992), which documents the burning of the oil fields in Kuwait after the Gulf War. It’s contemplative and mellow, but very dark as well.

I think you’re right with this example. For me, the new material is the same. It’s pessimistic, naive and slow. You can hear in this song [“Dream About”] that it’s a bit broken. It’s resigned, calm. Almost every [one of our] songs pretends to be a regular song, but they’re really mantras about nothingness. They really are songs of nowhere.

Trupa Trupa will perform three dates at SXSW 2019 on 14, 15 & 16 March, as well Poznań on 26 April and Sharpe Festival, Bratislava, on 27 April.

Still from Leto Russian underground chronicler Artemy Troitsky talks to Ilia Rogatchevski about Leto, Kirill Serebrennikov's new film documenting the 1980s Soviet rock scene

Artemy Troitsky is a Russian music journalist, cultural critic and video blogger. He is the author of books such as Back In The USSR: The True Story Of Rock In Russia (1987), Tusovka: Who’s Who In The New Soviet Rock Culture (1990) and Subkultura: Stories Of Youth And Resistance In Russia (2017). Troitsky began his career in the early 1980s and is closely associated with the rising wave of Soviet rock musicians, who came to prominence during this time. Two key artists from this period were Viktor Tsoi and Mike Naumenko, chief songwriters and frontmen of the bands Kino and Zoopark, respectively. The two men had a close working relationship and both died young, in tragic, but unrelated circumstances, at the beginning of the 1990s.

Kino are a true phenomenon. Rock was an illicit artform in the Soviet Union before the 1980s and the band shot to popularity in Mikhael Gorbachev’s Perestroika era begun in 1985. Fusing elements of new wave, post punk and pop, with lyrics that articulated the defiance of the Russian soul, Kino’s music captured the ambiguous divide between totalitarianism and an uncertain future. Naumenko’s Zoopark also reflected the disaffection of Soviet youth, but whereas Kino’s legacy extends far beyond its original context, Zoopark’s music struggles to resonate with young Russians today due to Naumenko’s frosty intellectual detachment.

Kino “Khochu Peremen!” (“I Want Change!”, 1989)

Directed by Kirill Serebrennikov, Leto (Summer, 2018), is based on the recollections of Naumenko’s widow Natasha. Set in the summer of 1982, around the time when Kino recorded their debut album 45, the plot focuses on Tsoi and Naumenko’s working relationship. There is, however, an additional dimension to the story: a love triangle between Tsoi, Naumenko and Natasha. Even before its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, the movie managed to generate waves of controversy from people who knew the protagonists personally. Musicians such as Boris Grebenshchikov, of the band Akvarium, and Aleksei Rybin, who co-founded Kino with Tsoi in 1981, criticised the screenplay for being unfaithful to true events.

Prior to the completion of filming, on 22 August 2017 Serebrennikov was arrested by the Russian authorities on charges of fraud. His theatre company Sedmaya Studiya (Studio Seven) is accused of embezzling 133 million rubles (£1.5 million) of government grants. It has been suggested that the arrest was a repressive reaction to Serebrennikov’s previous film The Student (2016), which is heavily critical of the Orthodox church and the Russian education system. The above charges are unrelated to Leto, but the scandal has helped to generate hype around the film. Serebrennikov was forced to complete it under house arrest and remains incarcerated while awaiting trial to this day.

Meanwhile, Leto has been praised by critics at home and abroad. Its soundtrack, which was produced by the contemporary Russian rock band Zveri (the band’s frontman Roman Bilyk plays the lead role of Naumenko in the film) won a prize at Cannes. It features covers of classic compositions by not only Tsoi and Naumenko, but also Iggy Pop, David Bowie and Talking Heads. A spin-off documentary by Serebrennikov about the making of the film called Posle Leta (After Summer) was released in Russian cinemas on the 6 September 2018. Artemy Troitsky worked both as a consultant on Leto and was interviewed for Posle Leta.

Ilia Rogatchevski spoke to him about the cultural fallout of Serebrennikov’s project.

Naumenko/Zveri in Leto (Summer, 1982/2018)

Ilia Rogatchevski: You worked as a consultant on the film Leto. When did Serebrennikov ask you to work with him and what did this role involve?

Artemy Troitsky: Kirill Serebrennikov, whom I have known for at least 15 years, called me around January or February 2017. He told me about the film, asked to check the script and give permission to ‘use my character’ in the movie. He also suggested that I take part in the shoot, because initially he wanted to mix the actors with the real 1980s people.

Can you share any details about the shoot?

I was present at the shoots in Saint Petersburg (September 2017, Rock Club) and winter 2017/18 in Moscow for the kvartirnik [scene, an unauthorised concert in a private apartment – Ed]. In both cases, I've done big on-camera interviews with Sceptic (Aleksandr Kuznetsov), which later were used in the documentary Posle Leta. The atmosphere and the vibe at the shootings were great, very enthusiastic, but rather unlike ‘the real thing’.

What was ‘the real thing’ like?

Quite impossible or too long to explain.

Was there always an idea to make a concurrent documentary, or do you think Serebrennikov suspected there may be dislike angled towards Leto from the old guard and he wanted to answer it preemptively?

Posle Leta was an improvisation. Initially, the idea was to make one film, as usual, and mix the actors and comments from the vosmidesyatniki [the generation of artists and intellectuals living and working in the 1980s – Ed]. Later it appeared that there is way too much material. Leto is over two hours long. Serebrennikov decided to put together a separate documentary for the same budget.

Iggy Pop/Anton Sevidov “The Passenger” (1977/2018)

What were your initial thoughts on the screenplay? Did they match those of Boris Grebenshchikov and Aleksei Rybin?

The ‘affair’ between Natasha Naumenko (Irina Starshenbaum) and Viktor Tsoi (Teo Yoo) was, as we all think, Natasha’s fantasy. No one among the closest friends – Aleksei Rybin included – knew about it.

Why do you think they responded so negatively to it?

Building the whole plot around a love triangle that did not exist was, well, dodgy. Hence the reaction.

In one of your video blogs you said that ‘out of every screenplay, even the worst kind, you can make a good movie’. Do you feel this is the case with Leto?

Yes, this is what I think now too. This is the reason why: despite obvious questions about the script – I told Serebrennikov straight away that there was no love story – I agreed to work with them. Serebrennikov is an extraordinary director and I believed he would produce something worthwhile.

Were you at all surprised by Serebrennikov’s arrest? How did this affect the production of the film?

Indeed, everyone was shocked about the arrest! It was absolutely unexpected. But soon they learned how to cope with it. All the footage was immediately sent to Serebrennikov and he made commands by phone or internet. It was really complicated but they managed.

Kino “Bezdelnik No 2” (“Slacker No 2”, 1982)

As somebody who has lived through the Soviet period, how do you think the repressions of that time compare to Russia today?

The Soviet Union was a totalitarian state, there was total control. The Russian Federation is a hybrid totalitarian state. The authorities choose what to control and who to punish. And it's not always predictable, like in the Serebrennikov case – he was never an outspoken oppositional activist.

Do you feel that Serebrennikov's film interpretation gets across the atmosphere of the time?

Most objections regarding Leto deal with factual details not the general feeling. I think it’s simply impossible to ideally recreate the atmosphere of 35 years ago, but it was a good try.

Why do you think Tsoi's legacy still resonates with young people today, but Naumenko has largely been forgotten?

Tsoi and Kino were a great pop band, with remarkable melodic hooks and a straight, positive romantic image. They were like the Beatles. Mike Naumenko was like Lou Reed: an intellectual songwriter, way too ironic, subversive and negativistic for a general audience.

In a previous interview you noted that ‘total internal emigration’ was an important tool for Soviet musicians to experience freedom. Do you think this is still true for underground musicians working today?

Inner emigration is still fine, but I feel that the new generation is in a less escapist mood. Those who want to emigrate, do emigrate. It’s easy now. But those who remain – at least many of them are ready to fight.

ГШ (Glintshake) & Aleksandr Gorchilin “Psycho Killer” (2018)

What did you think about Leto's soundtrack?

The soundtrack sounds too good to my ears. I would rather stick to the original bad quality tapes. But again it's a respectable try. It isn’t khaltura (a hack job), and could have been much worse.

Do you think that the addition of bands such as Glintshake and Shortparis in the soundtrack was an attempt to draw parallels between underground music in the 1980s and now?

Well, I noticed Shortparis at the acid party scene at the end of the film but I don’t recall Glintshake. [Glintshake do not appear on screen, but their cover of Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” soundtracks the film’s riotous train scene – Ed] Both bands are good, totally unlike the 1980s Soviet groups, and do not look completely out of place in the movie. Probably the purists hate it, but I think it is a funny trick. It kind of symbolises the connection of two gloomy periods in Russian history and the young rebels’ reaction to it.

Leto will be screened at the BFI London Film Festival on 14 and 15 October 2018.