Nick Tremo is the stage name of a fundamentally anonymous musician/DJ from the ancient Ukrainian town of Uzhgorod. He has been responsible for a couple of releases this year, both offered through the net label/aggregator Qulture. More specifically, in mid March a one-hour, fifteen track instrument...
Valeriya, in the name of brevity, is one of Russia's most famous singers. Relatively objective proof of that fact can be found not in her PR materials, but in documented concert activity. Over the course of last year, for example, she played in Cannes, supported Simply Red in the UK, and spent the...
The music in this post, for all its modern wizardry, comes from one of the oldest towns known to Slavic culture: Uzhgorod in Western Ukraine, near the border with both Slovakia and Hungary. Uzhgorod dates at least to the ninth century, when the creation of a castle allowed safe and settled growth...
Santerna is the pseudonym of Moscow-based trance/progressive exponent Aleksandr Deviat'iarov, who prides himself on being the first Russian DJ with a release via London's Mondo Records. With dubious chutzpah, the label claims to be "one of the UK's premier dance labels specializing in house, t...
Cubic is an outfit that values simplicity very highly. Its members - who remain virtually anonymous - are contained within the MixGalaxy project that operates out of St Petersburg. The label has thus far produced a couple of very interesting compilations, which are not in any way generically def...
In the world of Russian dance music, some genres are considered more "provincial" than others. Trance, rightly or wrongly, is often assumed to be one of the styles most likely to fill lop-sided village halls in distant locations. Comedy shows and parodic cinema will certainly make use of trance...
Each summer, between late July and late August, the Kazantip festival becomes - arguably - the biggest dance-related event across all of Russia and Ukraine. Set on the sunny shores of the Crimea, Kazantip has long been an annual object of desire for more than 150,000 revellers. This year was no...
Late last year we took a look at the drum & bass outfit CMOS Killers from the southern beach resort of Sochi, shown above on a cloudy day. At the same time we noted a couple of things in their discography. Firstly, it was clear that the economic situation in the area was less than jolly (thi...
DJs Oxide and Sasha Voron have just released a double CD of full-blooded breaks as a sixth contribution to the ongoing "Breaks Sessions" series, which began in 2005. These two men are from St Petersburg and well established both in the local club scene and in the capital. Oxide (below) - who...
St Petersburg's wonderful 56 Stuff label has just published another winning release, this time from The Pillow People. Entitled "Nymphet," it does what we'd unnervingly expect ~ and investigates some aspects of Nabokovian sexuality. The EP's cover (below) shows a young girl being bundled into...
