CULTURE

Chernov’s choice

Gogol Bordello, the multi-ethnic folk-punk band from New York that mixes punk rock, Gypsy folk music and cabaret, returns to the city for a one-off show this week.

Speaking to The St. Petersburg Times before his first visit to Russia (that time the band only played Moscow) in 2006, Ukraine-born frontman Eugene Hutz, said his band was originally called Bulgakov Bordello, taking its name from the Kiev-born author of “The Master and Margarita.”

“It was really much more in the spirit of the band than Gogol, but I quickly found out that in the West they have a vague idea about who Gogol is and they don’t know Bulgakov, so I had to go with another compatriot,” he said back then.

“I just wanted a symbol of something that is Western European, but at the same time is not nationalistic — [something that is] very rooted in the culture, yet speaks in a cosmopolitan way. And Gogol is a perfect candidate for that.

“Ethno avant-garde is the direction here. It’s also like film director [Sergei] Paradzhanov, or Bela Bartok in classical music. It’s just an accumulation and reinterpretation of original culture to the level of original artwork. It’s totally void of any actual quotes or playing traditional numbers, it’s not anything like that.”

In 2006, Hutz was radically punk in some of his statements, dismissing the New York band The Strokes, which was big at that time, as “boys from a modelling agency.”

Oddly, the following year saw Hutz and the band’s violinist, Sergey Ryabtsev, join Madonna on stage for “La Isla Bonita / Lela Pala Tute.” The performance at the London Live Earth concert on July 7, 2007, added to the band’s publicity, if not to its integrity.

Nevertheless, for many, the band’s upcoming concert eclipses anything else going on in St. Petersburg on a musical level. Gogol Bordello will perform at Glavclub on Tuesday.

The Antipop Consortium, an alternative hip-hop group from New York, appears to be a central point at the two-day Electro Mekhanika electronic music event this week.

According to the band’s biography, it formed in the fall of 1997, united under the credo “disturb the equilibrium.” The Anti-Pop Consortium came together as a “divergent force to resist the evil empire Hip Hop was slowly becoming.”

Promoted by and held at the Sergei Kuryokhin Modern Art Center, Electro Mekhanika was launched last year as an annual electronic music event in addition to SKIF, the Sergei Kuryokhin International Festival, a celebration of left-field music genres held annually in April.

Dozens of electronic acts, local and international (including Great Britain’s Anti-Social Entertainment, Germany’s Gudrun Gut and Australia’s Lawrence English), will perform on the three stages of the former Soviet film theater for two nights on Friday and Saturday. See Gigs, page 9-10 for the schedule.

— By Sergey Chernov

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