Detachment / McMarian - Cienie (Shadows) -1988- (Tape, A.R.S.), US/Poland

Here's another obscurity from the Polish home-taping circuit from behind the Iron Curtain. This time it's a split-cassette between the American act Detachment created by Craig Coe from Dayton, Ohio recorded between '86 and '88 and McMarian one of Poland's great industrial home-taping acts created by Marcin Bednarski and Piotr Kalinowski from the city Kraków.

It's an interesting fact that this isn't just a Polish cassette and that the members of McMarian were somehow able to share and receive music material over the borders of the socialist state, even if the political system was in its very last stage before the collapse. The Polish home-taping scene had been created by necessity since these type of bands were unable to release their music officially, nevertheless one can see that they did have ties with the international cassette culture. Cienie, meaning shadows, is a vivid example of this mechanism, that through its "secret" distribution had much more meaning than just having a taste for particular music. It's part of an unclassifiable almost non-existing area where art opened up a place for individuals who could gain some autonomy through their marginalized practices to counter the political and cultural programming of the totalitarian regime.

I can't find much info on the Detachment project from the US, but it somehow reminds me of the minimal synth sounds of Patrick Gibson from Australia. A very nice combination of experimental sounds and rhythmic industrial minimal synth. The tracks by McMarian have an even stronger foundation in rhythmic industrial music creating loops of manipulated rhythms in combination with samples. Specially the last tracks on the tape remind me of the primitive era of Esplendor Geométrico from Spain or the early Australian industrial act Mesh.

Actually the music is quite nice, unfortunately it's buried under a thick layer of white noise. I tried to digitize this several times to get a better sound (dolby, no dolby, equalizing etc.), until I found out it will just turn out to be like this. With renaming files and cutting I've spent four hours on this tape. The opening track by Detachment also starts low in volume and then starts to peak later on. Anyway, that's one of the things with those obscure tapes from Eastern Europe from the 80's, the quality is not that high. But because of its background and totally different cultural and technical circumstances the music should be appreciated in its lo-fi nature as a testament of the underground. It actually sounds better directly from cassette, as if the music has become one with its medium.

This tape was limited to 50 copies.

Kindly donated by the Y Create archive

Get it HERE

BP. Service - Same -1990- (Tape, Weast CMC Agency), Hungary

This is the first in a series of Hungarian cassettes that I will slowly upload to the blog:

BP. Service was one of Hungary's important industrial music groups. Industrial music in Hungary did exist behind the iron curtain in the 80's but in very marginal forms. Some of the bands I can come up with are Art Deco (posted ages ago on the blog), CMC and Falatra(x). Basically it was not until the early nineties that industrial groups could publish their music regularly in Hungary and that also more groups started to exist.

BP. Service consisted of Szabó György, Kósa Vince and Orbán Balázs. Szabo György is subsequently known for his graphic design and creating many of the posters for underground concerts in Budapest before the fall of the iron curtain. Lately those posters have received renewed attention and have been compiled in a book. Kósa Vince was also the founder of the group Art Deco and can be considered as one of the pioneers of Industrial music in Hungary.

This cassette that came out in 1990 contains two lengthy tracks of classic industrial sounds. It conceptually takes on the big city or metropole (in this case Budapest) as a place of noise where traffic, construction, dirt, automation and industry are part of the daily urban environment. A concept that can be seen often in this particular vein of industrial music, tracing back most notably to Berlin's finest Einstürzende Neubauten, but ofcourse there are numerous examples. The music contains bleak Hungarian lyrics, sound-manipulations and the use of metal and other physical materials that are being used rhythmically.

Get it HERE

Art Deco - 1983-84-85 Live Select & '86 Select (Budapest), Hungary

Art Deco was a Hungarian industrial group that started in the early eighties. They are mostly famous because they did quite some concerts together with bands like Test Dept. and Die Tödliche Doris. I think they have also played at the famous Berlin Atonal Festival. Usually when somebody mentions this band it is typified as the “Hungarian Einstürzende Neubauten” which on the one hand side isn’t really strange. Bands behind the iron curtain had little knowledge of musical developments so when encountering a seven-times-overdubbed C-60 tape of a band like Einstürzende Neubauten sure they were influenced by it and were recreating something alike. 

However, in itself bands like Art Deco were very obscure in Hungary and even today when it’s more than 20 years ago that the iron curtain fell, bands like these are still somewhat in the shadows of slightly more popularized sounds that we know from the nineties. Industrial, weird New Wave, Punk etc. were not really fully flourishing in the Eastern Block (except Yugoslavia), unless you knew about this fringe stuff and you didn’t consider the commercialized fashion side. Actually you could just go to jail for doing things that could be perceived subversive. So it’s safe to say that these bands are quite unique. Moreover they did have own artistic content and created music as good as everywhere else.

This cassette has live songs on the A side and studio songs on the B side. Furthermore this is a self made compilation as you can see. The live-side has music from ’83, ’84 and ’85 and is reminiscent of the great (!) Hungarian shamanistic rock group Vágtázó Hallotkémek (VHK). Specially with the depressive Hungarian vocals that are about other realities and dark voids, it creates a similar atmosphere. The non-live side is from ’86 and consists of a twenty minutes church choir and bells straight forward classic industrial track reminding me of Current 93’s Nature Unveiled period. The other tracks resemble strongly rhythm based industrial acts like Esplendor Geometrico, early Test Dept or even more so the dutch band Het Zweet.

This is an old and rare cassette, so this also shows the ups and downs in sound and production. It tried my best, but on some songs the stereo starts to be mono and so on. Also I don't know the song titles, so I called them untitled. Art Deco is a great obscure band that needs more attention, especially their old material. You can find some other music from Art Deco here and someone is doing a compilation on Hungarian industrial and wave music here where you also find nice posters of this band.

Enjoy!

More things are slowly being uploaded to the blog! I’ve been extremely busy, but stay tuned! More Eastern European cassettes, more other stuff!