Various Artists – Anthology of Post-Industrial Music from Balkan Region

[Reviewed by Psymon Marshall]

Given that it’s only been thirty years since the fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent breaking away of former satellite and client states, this anthology of the explorations of sonic artists from the Balkan region of south-east Europe represents an appropriate opportunity to explore how the influence of Communist (and repressive) Soviet culture created a particular approach to the making of music, particularly in terms of the industrial genre. Back in the early 90s when I ran an industrial music ‘zine I used to get a smattering of releases from Russian acts, and it would be fair to define the parameters of their output tended to be on the harsher, noisier side of the spectrum, in a sense the sound equivalent of Brutalist architecture. Even then I wondered whether this was a reflection of Eastern European culture as we understood it then (given how…