Gogol Bordello: Tiny Desk Concert

Gogol Bordello's NPR Tiny Desk Concert.
Great. Not much to add. Watch the video here.

Gogol Bordello: Trans-Continental Hustle

James Jeffrey reviews Gogol Bordello's Trans-Continental Hustle.

Some music can be judged properly only by one criterion: would it make a decent soundtrack to riding a horse through the streets of Kiev while swigging wine? Gogol Bordello surely has this in mind, launching the latest of its rambunctious musical adventures with the swift one-two punch of Pala Tute and My Compamjera, songs that combine Romany and English lyrics with a Slavic sense of life-and-death urgency and driving rhythms almost impossible to remain sober to.

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Gogol Bordello: Start Wearing Purple

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Top Ten Albums Of 2007

Selection from Cinema Blend's Top Ten Albums Of 2007.

1. Gogol Bordello – Super Taranta
Gogol Bordello tops my list this year, if only because their music is intelligent, addictive and actually makes you laugh out loud. “Who's crawlin' up my spine – alcohol/ I've been waiting long long time – alcohol/ Now you teach me how to rhyme – alcohol/ Just don't stab me in the back with cartisol,” frontman Eugene Hütz sings on “Alcohol”, one of the most surprisingly successful tracks on the album. It’s surprising because it’s a slow ballad (albeit to alcohol) that grabs as much attention as any of their manic tracks have on their past releases. This isn’t to say, though, that their usual style of frantic Eastern-European folk-punk is anywhere near forgotten; if anything, they’re at the top of their gypsy-punk game with songs such as “Wonderlust King” and “American Wedding”. It’s like Borat in audio form—hysterically brilliant, subtly clever and topped with an awesome moustache.

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Interview with Gogol Bordello's Eugene Hütz

Joe Adler interviews Gogol Bordello's lead singer Eugene Hütz.

Does Eugene Hütz, strike you as particularly laid back? You think he stands stoically in front of his microphone like Thom Yorke? Nope. Hütz, the Urkranian born lead singer of gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello is particularly animated, and he’s not ready to stand back and let his guitarist do the talking.

Gogol Bordello’s latest offering, Super Taranta! is their second stellar album, following 2005’s GYPSY PUNKS: Underground World Strike and has put the band as leaders of a new genre. Gogol Borello is molding Eastern European and Gypsy influence with Western culture within a scene that includes Balkan Beat Box, Beirut and DeVotchKa. Comprised of eight other members, Gogol is arguably one of the most captivating live acts today, with Hütz leading the band to their on-stage blow-up of fury and joy.

As an avid supporter of Romani Rights, Hütz uses his music to introduce the gypsy culture to a wider audience. He is also one of the curators of the annual New York Gypsy festival and an acclaimed actor having starred in 2005’s Everything is Illuminated alongside Elijah Wood. In 2008, Hütz will play the lead character in Filth and Wisdom, the film that marks Madonna’s directorial debut.

Glide recently had a chance to talk with the always energetic Hütz, who, with song titles like "Think Locally, Fuck Globally" speaks his mind as openly as making the moustache cool again.

Eugene, it’s been a crazy few months for you, how are things?

Been fantastic man. Doing multiple nights in the cities and bombing people with new material. And I’m already, pretty much in the middle of writing the next record.

Is that going to be an expansion of your past work or something completely new?

It’s always a new revolutionary incarnation of it, you know. I don’t have the outline of it and I imagine it will sound not like what I think now. The writing process is well in the middle of it. Right now for me a lot of things came into focus, a kind of coherency of what we’re doing came more into focus. So I’m not sure if we’re now going to fuck it all up and make it entirely incoherent or make it even more coherent. I don’t know.

Do you collaborate with the rest of the band in your writing process?

I collaborate on arrangement a lot, which is why you read: words by Eugene and music by Eugene and Gogol Bordello. I write the songs but because there are so many different instruments and with the process of arraignment, things can really expand.

So please talk about back in your childhood, the Refugee Relocation program and your move from Kiev to the U.S. How did it affect your creative experience?

By the time I was done with the Refugee program I could swear in five different languages only because I was living with Czech and Romanian and with Albanian and so on and so forth. So, of course, that developed more to play with as I met many different kinds of people. And that brought new color for me right away you know. And these were not people on the calmer side of things, these were pretty much the more wilder kind of ethnicities. I would say that. So we had the good times and the bad times with them but it was just a kind of school of getting along I suppose. A school of getting along with people that you would not
normally choose to hang out with.

So about how old were you when you first started playing music?

There are many photos of me when I was two, three, four, five and six years old with guitars. I don’t know, somewhere around that time.

At this point have you met any of the musicians who influenced your style?

Oh for sure. Now I know people from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and one of them produced our first record and then their producer produced our last record. I guess I didn’t fall off that fucking far from the tree you know. So I guess that kind of made me feel more optimistic in a sense of, that life, is once again possible and things can get better. And the romantic idea that I had in youth, that this kind of aesthetic tree is growing throughout the world where this kind of school keeps on living. So that’s a very exciting part for our band and me.

Are there other influences of yours that you would like to get together with?

You know Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Sonic Youth, Primus and yeah I haven’t met Tom Waits yet. But at the same time he is one house away from Les Claypool and Les Claypool has been playing on his records for the last ten years.

So is Tom Waits someone who had a great influence on you and your musical style?

Actually he didn’t influence it all that much, he is more like somebody that I could easily understand and I can have an affinity for and I can relate to. Actually we were casted for a movie together except for that I ended up not doing that movie because of a tour. It is a movie called Wristcutters and I was supposed to play the lead role but I bailed out on that movie because I had a European tour, three month log tour and music is my life you know. Tom was in this movie and we made the soundtrack so there is an interesting connection like that going on all of the time. But I don’t feel like Tom Waits influenced me in one way or the other. He was just great. I gained much more from The Birthday Party and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and that neck of the woods.

So going more into the movie thing. First, your role in Everything Is Illuminated is inspiring. You portrayed or embodied the role of “Alex” in a way that came across as maybe being close to your own personality. Do you identify with the character?

Well you know, I greatly appreciate when people say things like you just said, that they completely see me in the character. And that’s because a lot of thought goes into it because, essentially that character is an absolute creation and there is nothing what-so-ever similar between that character and me. When I was doing press for the movie, people were always looking so disappointed that Alex was not sitting there, that was sitting there was the person that played Alex. Which just shows that the role was very successful.

People were literally in grief because the guy actually doesn’t exist. But that’s what good acting does, you completely convince people that that character should be alive. I was playing a 20 year-old virgin. I was 32 years old by that time and what I had behind me was far from being misinformed.

Could you tell me a little about your new film Filth and Wisdom.

I can say a little about it. I play the lead role, this time it’s much closer to my actual character, to actual me. I play the lead singer of Gogol Bordello you know. The whole band is in it and the reason for that is that actor herself, Madonna.

She’s been a great supporter and fan of our band. It was almost just a matter of time before we did something together. People, even the creators of Everything Is Illuminated, from them I knew she was a fan of our band. So I wasn’t entirely shocked when it happened, when I heard from her.

Did Gogol Bordello record music for the soundtrack?

There is about four or five or six songs from Gogol Bordello in that movie. I’m flying to London to do the screening to see the film next week actually. And it’s not a short film anymore, it’s a full feature. So to hell with the shorts man, nobody needs ‘em!

Was it during the filming of Filth and Wisdom that the opportunity came together for you and Sergey (violinist Sergey Ryabstev) to perform with Madonna at Live Earth?

Yeah it actually came together on the last day of shooting. And I always carry my guitar with me. Madonna very cleverly noticed that the songs that I’m playing, the gypsy songs, during the breaks (in filming) just to entertain people and myself, they were very much connected with the Spanish key and she had a song ("La Isla Bonita") in a Spanish key so we put two songs together, basically five days before the Live Earth.

I watched the performance online and that was by far the best performance of the day. It came across as being so polished.

That’s what we were shooting for, something that people could not conceive in their minds. Do it cleverly and do it musically well. The way that the songs were put together was very much with respect to both songs. And the only real part that she changed from my suggestions is she made our parts twice as long. I had an incredible time working with her. Coming from the underground and never knowing that much about pop culture and never being a part of pop culture for me to work with somebody like Madonna was like a walk on another planet. I just realized how special she was as a person and how different her methods and how hard her work is in contrast to most of the people in pop culture with power and huge bull dozing egos and no message. That was the way I learned why she was such an inspiration to the whole generation. Person to person, that’s how I learned.

So I was reading about your New Rebel Intelligence concept, could you talk about that and where it came from?

It came directly from the nature of the band. Obviously it’s very diffuse personnel, not only country-wise but interest-wise. It’s like one person is into meditating, and another person is into mysticism, and the third one is into aliens, and the forth one is completely happy and doesn’t drink. It’s very diverse, all the walks of life, we are in the middle of it. We become the center of all these things at once.

To me that is like a new picture of the world because I believe the people that are gathered in our band are very progressive and intelligent personalities, just of different kinds. Processing everybody’s information all at once, from cosmology to basic remedies in art and therapy and so on and so forth are coming together with this idea of connecting dots and just having a certain walk of life that keeps all those things together. Which is most notably is independent intelligence, independence of thought and open mindedness. But not the new age kind of open-mindedness and, fucking, raising the awareness. I don’t fucking believe in raising the awareness, I believe in fucking getting down. Getting down with the shit and making it fucking happen. Not tomorrow, but today, starting now!

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Interview with Sergey Ryabtsev

Dmitry Kiper interviews Sergey Ryabtsev, Gogol Bordello's violinist.

At a performance by the “gypsy-punk” band Gogol Bordello, you don’t just feel the music. You let that feeling out—sweating, stomping, and springing into the air—because you can’t hold it in. Prodding the crowd, violinist Sergey Ryabtsev pumps out sweet, fast melodies, slicing the strings with his bow and shooting lightning bolt after lightning bolt into the audience.

“I don’t just want to play music,” says Ryabtsev, a forty-eight-year-old, classically trained Russian violinist. “I want the mysticism that I feel to get transferred to the crowd.”

Like Gogol Bordello’s live shows, Ryabtsev’s life journey has been full of wild surprises, improvisations, and revelations. After his first concert with the band seven years ago, an experience that genuinely frightened and intrigued him, he was hooked. He traveled to Brooklyn from Russia in the 1990s not expecting to play violin for a living or even stay, but he ended up doing both. And now that the band’s popularity is rising, Ryabtsev is beginning to get worldwide recognition.

Because most of his fellow band members are in their thirties, Ryabtsev, who admits to looking older than his age, stands out on stage. He has long, silver hair, a trimmed, gray beard, dark brown eyes, and a round gypsy earring dangling from his left ear. He speaks English with a noticeable Russian accent.

Ryabtsev’s violin style is unique: He plays doubles—the root note of a scale together with its octave, or with the third or sixth note—which makes it sound as if more than one violin is playing. “That’s my own technique,” says Ryabtsev, in Russian, “and it’s perfect for gypsy-punk.” Soon he corrects himself, contending that Gogol Bordello is neither pure gypsy nor pure punk but something entirely different. “Gogol Bordello is a cat with three heads. It’s something that shouldn’t exist.”

Ryabtsev speaks in a charged manner, with wide-open, unblinking eyes and rapidly moving hands and arms—sometimes with one hand punching the palm of the other to physically italicize his words. The band, he says with his lips and hands, is all about life. “Gogol Bordello is not only music. It’s an ideology: our relationship to life, people, possibilities.”

Sitting in the modest kitchen of the one-bedroom Ocean Parkway apartment where he lives with his wife, Ryabtsev is sipping Chianti and wearing a black, sleeveless Gogol Bordello T-shirt. The bookshelves of his living room are filled not only with Russian classics—collections of Chekhov, Pushkin, and Dostoevsky—but dozens of magazine and newspaper articles about Gogol Bordello, a collection he’s very proud of. And of course there’s a copy of the book and movie Everything Is Illuminated. (In 2005, alongside Elijah Wood, Gogol Bordello frontman Eugene Hütz starred in the film, and the band contributed to the soundtrack.)

Ryabtsev, who has studied violin from the age of six, learned his first life-lesson at seventeen. His father, an engineer, was drinking vodka with his workmates in the kitchen and called his son to play violin for them. Most of them had never heard a violin, and one had never even seen one.

“What do I play?” he asked.

“It doesn’t matter. Just play.”

He hesitated until his father called him over and whispered, “If you don’t play now, they will never get a chance to see this again.” So he played. And when he finished, his understanding of music had changed. He realized, he says, that “music is a big part of real life.”

Ryabtsev spent another nine years studying violin and then dropped out of the conservatory, where he felt the connection between art and life didn’t exist. “I was suffocating in that elite atmosphere,” he says.

Ryabtsev became a theater actor and then a director. When he arrived in America in 1994 for a theater conference in Connecticut, he had no idea that he would end up staying. After the conference, he went to New York City in search of a job, maybe as a dishwasher, so that he could bring some money back to his family. But he found nothing. When his new Russian friends suggested he play violin on the street, he was very reluctant. But his insistent buddies took him to Brighton Beach Avenue and told him to play. “See this pack of cigarettes?” one of them said. “You’re going to play until we finish it.” People came up to compliment his playing, wish him luck in America; one woman even brought him a suit. “What planet is this?” he wondered. In three hours, he had made $45. He was amazed.

“I came from Russia, where nothing was happening,” he says. “I knew what my life was going to be like for the next twenty years. But here, I didn’t know what was going to happen in the next moment.”

He played violin in Brighton Beach for a year, where he was approached by locals, weekenders, fellow Russians, conductors, and even mobsters. He began playing at Russian restaurants. Every day was an adventure.

But nothing could have prepared Ryabtsev for Gogol Bordello. In 2000, after a night of playing with his Russian gypsy band at Moscow, a now-defunct Russian restaurant in Manhattan, Ryabtsev was approached by Eugene Hütz, founder and frontman of Gogol Bordello. Hütz—tall, thin, flamboyantly dressed, and sporting a vaudeville mustache—came out to hear him play violin, but having missed the performance asked him to play another set. The band and the restaurant owner complied, Hütz explains in his Ukrainian accent, “because I had a lot of American girls with me.”

After hearing him play, Hütz told Ryabtsev, in Russian, “I have a well-known band. We’re playing Joe’s Pub tomorrow. Can you play with us?”

“Tomorrow? What kind of music do you play?” said Ryabtsev.

“It doesn’t matter,” Hütz replied.

Ryabtsev was sure he was dealing with “a madman.” To this day, Hütz’s reply—a distant echo of what Ryabtsev’s father told his young son in the kitchen—puzzles Ryabtsev and makes him laugh boisterously.

Hütz gave him Gogol Bordello’s first CD, Voi-La Intruder, and told him to give it a listen before the show. Ryabtsev had never heard anything like it. “With horror I wondered where a violin could fit into this music,” he recalls.

Ryabtsev didn’t sleep that night.

The next day, he arrived at Joe’s Pub with his violin in hand. Being a classically trained musician, Ryabtsev put on a tuxedo and waited for his cue. When he finally came out on stage, he was stunned. People were half-naked, drinking from bottles and dancing crazily beside broken furniture. Hütz, standing on top of the bar in his underwear dancing with two women, yelled in Russian, “Sergey, play!”

After finishing the song, Ryabtsev, in amazement, began to walk off stage. Hütz grabbed him. “Where are you going? Play!” Ryabtsev pleaded, “Play what?” Hütz yelled back, “Whatever you want.” Hütz was confident in Ryabtsev’s ability to improvise, and he ended up playing for almost an hour. After the show, he says, he felt infected with “the virus of freedom.”

On a recent Thursday night at Mehanata, a Lower East Side dance club that’s home to some of New York City’s best Romany (the preferred term to “gypsy”) and Eastern European music, Hütz—who DJs regularly at the club when Gogol Bordello is on break from touring—waxed lyrical about Ryabtsev. Asked to describe him in one sentence, Hütz said, “I can describe him in one word: supernatural.”

It turned out he had more than one word. He approached minutes later with a cup of red wine in hand, smiling, shirt unbuttoned, and said he had more to say. The first time he saw Ryabtsev play at the restaurant, “I heard all my songs in my head and I knew he was gonna slice all over them…He’s more than what I hoped for because of his artistic and theater background.”
Ryabtsev says that after coming to the United States, two events have had the most profound impact on his life: meeting his (third) wife, Olga Mateshko, and playing with Eugene Hütz at Joe’s Pub that crazy night.

Hütz not only brought him into Gogol Bordello and opened up his musical taste—by introducing him to Jimi Hendrix, Tom Waits, the Clash, and Iggy Pop—but also “increased the boiling temperature in my kettle,” says Ryabtsev, who is fond of metaphors with heat, fire, and cooking. “We’re stirring an energetic kasha” is how he describes a live gig. “A club becomes a kettle in which we’re cooking along with the audience.”

Gogol Bordello always ends the cooking sessions with “Baro Foro,” a song Hütz sings almost entirely in Romany. Ryabtsev’s rapid violin riff in the song is immediately infectious, and gives the song what Hütz calls “a gypsy twitch.”

Then, speaking of not only the song but the band, Hütz adds: “It would never be the same without him.”

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Gogol Bordello on the Henry Rollins Show

Gogol Bordello performs on The Henry Rollins Show on IFC this Friday, Aug. 10 at 11:00 PM EST. The show will repeat on Aug. 11 at 4:55 AM EST and Aug. 14 at 12:30 AM EST.

See the interview with Eugene Hütz and a web-only performance of “Ultimate.”

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Gogol Bordello - Super Taranta

Fich Griwkowsky reviews Gogol Bordello's Super Taranta.

In this city, it's odd that not everyone knows Gogol Bordello. A punk Slav booze orchestra with acrobatic dancing girls - are you kidding me? Inside the band's chaotic coating lives a mad Ukrainian singer named Eugene Hutz - roving philosopher and one of the few modern "gypsies" to actually live up to the name. Based in New York, they put on the best live show there is. Seriously; early last year's show at the old Sidetrack was a flurry of legs, horns, accordions and near-nakedness that I'll never forget.

Bringing us to the new album, held up against the stellar Underdog World Strike of 2005.

Like its muscular predecessor, Super Taranta mixes the hooting, whistling and bootstomping of traditional Russian folk music with punchy guitars and an outright raunchy worldview. The echoey dub continues with more subtlety; it's more part of the band's general sound now, fitting the universal spirit of the seminal gypsy movie Latcho Drom. And if the whole album was as strong as the first three numbers, it'd get full marks.

Begins Hutz in his best bohunk, "If we are here not to do what you and I wanna do and go forever crazy with it, why the hell we are even here? There was never any good old days. They are today, they are tomorrow. It's a stupid thing we say, cursing tomorrow with sorrow."

And, yes, he really talks that way. The following song, "Wanderlust King", keeps up the spirit of the eternal and roving party the band's life must be.

There's a song about an uncle being an auntie, various condemnations of sedentary life and even a hilarious attack on American weddings, one-day things where the DJ is packing up his cords at 1 a.m. (A proper party is three days, as many of you know).

As always, the album can't begin to match the live show, but this is a collection of new material worth hearing. To make it really easy on you, buy the bright yellow album first.

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Gogol Bordello on the David Letterman Show 07/31/07.

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A Gogol Bordello's concert review.

Everyone in the crowd at the Fillmore at Irving Plaza is hot but happy, arms draped around friends – and strangers. As the beat blares, they jump in unison. It's a scene one expects to see at a Pearl Jam show rather than a concert where two of the foremost instruments are an accordion and a violin. But Gogol Bordello, a gypsy-punk outfit that has improbably become something of an It Band, takes pride in stirring up some of the craziest live shows on earth.

On stage, accordion, violin, drums, bass, and electric guitar create a high-speed punk symphony, while two masked go-go girls run around playing on washboards, drums, and fire buckets. Above the fray, Gogol Bordello frontman Eugene Hütz – hard to miss in tight purple pants and pointy blue shoes – strums his guitar, dances, and sings lines such as, "There were never any good old days/ They are today, they are tomorrow."

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