New worlds of wonderful sound

December 5, 2011 7:30 PM

"Far From Moscow is a resource designed to promote, catalog, and consider new music from Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, together with the Baltic nations (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia)." Posts are frequent and extensive and stuffed full of fantastic songs. They also offer a dozen free sampler albums; I'm listening to and loving Apples and the more ambient Forest.

Via the consistently brilliant Said the Gramophone; the band they write about, Pes i Gruppa, has a second song on the Apples sampler.

posted by Rory Marinich (12 comments total)

From the FFM site: The band's name, after all, can be translated as "Dog and the Group" or - worse still "Bitch and the Band," perhaps.

I'm very happy there's a website covering small-time music in Eastern Europe, but the above makes me wonder who writes their content. The word /p^jos/ (пёс) only refers to male dogs, like the English "pooch." The name of the band is… "Dog and Band."
posted by Nomyte at 7:44 PM on December 5, 2011

<3 Said the Gramophone.
posted by shakespeherian at 8:16 PM on December 5, 2011

Ooh, I'm liking these sample albums.
posted by sophist at 8:19 PM on December 5, 2011

"We're all children of the Soviet Union. We're idiots."

Holy shit this is great. The first Knyaz Mishkin and second Colour Dreams cuts at the right of your 'stuffed' link are so, so good. Can't wait to spend more time there. Thanks, Rory.
posted by mediareport at 8:21 PM on December 5, 2011

Happy you are enjoying the site as much as I did! I have a few other FFM finds that will be percolating their way onto Said the Gramophone in the coming weeks. (That is, while I try to wrangle this monster of a Best Songs of 2011 list.)

Improbably, Far From Moscow is run by David MacFadyen out of UCLA! Yes, as in Los Angeles.
posted by Marquis at 8:49 PM on December 5, 2011 [1 favorite]

Really, really far from Moscow...
posted by c13 at 9:21 PM on December 5, 2011

Damn, there's some great, sometimes out-there jazz on the Flight sampler, scattered among the more trad stuff. Try 17, 16, 13, 26, 18, and then 25 for a gorgeous, gentle, dreamy 18-minute trip. The other stuff's good, too, if you like mainstream or prog jazz (there's killer scatting on #10).

Yeah, wow, this is gonna take time to absorb. That's just one sampler. Thanks again (and to you, Marquis!).
posted by mediareport at 9:25 PM on December 5, 2011

Trivia: Far from Moscow is the title of one of the most notorious socialist realist novels, discussed at length here.
posted by daniel_charms at 11:19 PM on December 5, 2011

Great find Rory, downloading some of these now.
posted by arcticseal at 3:38 AM on December 6, 2011

The latest song that I feel instantly in love with was Birthday and Beasts by SBPCh. Of course, Far From Moscow has written a whole lot about them.

Marquis, do you happen to know how I can buy music from these artists? I searched for a while to no avail. So now I have a song apiece by a bunch of musicians I want to give money but can't.
posted by Rory Marinich at 5:30 AM on December 6, 2011

It takes a lot of Googling, to be honest - best place to start are the links on each artist's FFM profile page, as you found for SBPCh.

But you can also email David (contact info is on the About page); he's been very very helpful in my attempts to contact some labels.
posted by Marquis at 7:01 AM on December 6, 2011

Nice find. I'm currently listening to Motorama (FFM link, official site), who sound very much like New Order circa "Power, Corruption, and Lies". And they're doing it really well, and they've really got some great hooks and I'd recommend a listen. It would also seem that they have all of their music up on their website to download. Which is nice and all, but I would actually give them money for their music if they were to charge.
posted by Zack_Replica at 11:43 AM on December 6, 2011