Kultur Shock

"We've come for your jobs," say Kultur Shock. And it's true - at least if you happen to play in a band.

The boys from the Balkans have been around Seattle for a few years now, playing music with a definite Central European, gypsy flavor, all of which had its genesis is the play Behind God's Back, about the war in Sarajevo.

"We made a band after the play," recalls lead singer and synth player Gino Yevdjevich. "Joan Baez had helped us come over, and a couple of months after the play we started Kultur Shock, with a Bulgarian drummer, Borislav Iochev. That was in 1997. We were an acoustic band, after switching from the metal music of the play."

A brief tour with Baez followed, after which the band went on hiatus. Some of the members quit music, while Gino and Boris took a break for a year, before restarting "with [guitarist] Mario Butkovich, this genius kid from Bosnia who came to Portland on a refugee program. Later Brad Houser, from New Bohemians and Critters Buggin' joined, and Amy Denio and Jessica Lurie..."

"The music is totally folk, but we're a rock band."

Kultur Shock Live in Amerika, recorded in 1999, documented the band at the first full stage of their development, uncompromising, sometimes hilarious, as on "Emigrant's Song," but with a real sense of their history.

"The music is totally folk, but we're a rock band," explains Yevdjevich. "We started with traditional tunes, and now we're writing our own material. It's world music, but you can't call it world beat, because it's not beat. It's not commercialized. Call it world punk, it's very aggressive, hardcore world music. Its roots are in gypsy music. And we have a lot of middle Eastern flavor, but that's what they played in our home towns."

And now they've followed that up with their first studio disc, FUCC the I.N.S., that really captures their sound.Produced by Faith No More's Billy Gould, it's as if someone had parachuted the Clash into Bosnia, then brought them out a year later with a Balkan brass band in tow. It doesn't just rock, it explodes.

"We're trying not to take off the danceability, even though the songs are in odd meters," continues Yevdjevich. "But we want to articulate that with distorted guitars, things like that."

"We're pushing the envelope," add Kiossovski. "Every time you get tired of the folk format, something happens and you go ‘What is this?' "

Above all, it's about having fun with the music.

"We're monsterizing the songs," laughs Yevdjevich. "We take the theme from "Everybody Rock Your Body" by the Backstreet Boys and turn it into something that makes you wonder what's going on. It's a destruction and creation thing. And we're really having fun - that's the bottom line."

They talked to some majors about releasing the record, but they're all old enough - and with enough experience of the music business in their homelands - to be wary. They issued the live album themselves, and the new one has appeared on Gould's Kool Arrow label, which mostly issues punk records - in other words, a perfect, if slightly twisted, home.

"We really don't give a fuck about being rock stars," concludes Yevdjevich. "It started as a joke, and it's still a joke. If we make some money, good."

Kultur Shock

"The music is totally folk, but we're a rock band."

Related Articles in the 'North American Artists' Category...