Kósa Vince - Berkoff: A Görög -1994- (Tape, Razzia Distribution), Hungary

This cassette is a solo effort by Hungarian musician and Industrial music protagonist Kósa Vince. Kósa played in the pioneering Hungarian industrial group Art Deco (posted a long time ago on the blog) as well as in the industrial group BP. Service. On this cassette he plays the music to the play A Görög (The Greek) written by English actor and playwright Steven Berkoff that was premiered in 1980 in London and performed in the Radnóti Theatre in Budapest in 1994. The Greek was a modern interpretation of the well-known ancient tragedy Oedipus Rex by Sophocles. The tragedy that also inspired Freud in his work to develop his concept of the Oedipus complex.

The music on the tape consists of two long pieces. The first side starts with rhythm based industrial  in combination with collaged music taken from classical music. Later the music transitions into a subaquatic dark ambient soundscape. The B-side is a slightly more interesting affair, where Kósa fully embraces a synthetic tribal ambient sound even ending up in some 90's beats. Nevertheless it still holds on to darker atmospheres.

A Görög reminds me of the 1983 piece Neveleiland by Dutch home-tapers De Fabriek. Furthermore, the music is really in similar realms as the Hungarian avant-garde album Private Exits by composer Tibor Szemző or Hungarian composer László Hortobágyi and his electro-acoustic music built on Indian cosmologies.

A rare cassette, often mistaken for a screenplay or spoken word. Great music and soundscapes from the early nineties and another piece of the Hungarian experimental music puzzle. Lots of Hungarian cassettes still to come to the blog!

Recommended!

Get it HERE



PS: I have an extra copy of this tape. If you would like to trade it for another nice record or tape feel free to get in touch.

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