Studio Recordings Vol. 1

F.R.U.I.T.S. is one of those fantastically improbable evolutionary products that are characteristic for Russian culture. The duo, which came together in Moscow in 1992, consists of two multi-instrumentalists: Alexei Borisov and Pavel Zhagun. Borisov had started in the early 1980’s as a guitarist in Centre, the very first Russian new wave band, and later formed his own group Notchnoi Prospekt. During the 1980’s Notchnoi Prospekt went through a series of stylistic phases with each new reel-to-reel tape and vinyl album, including witty synth-pop, industrial psychedelia and guitar-based noise rock. Zhagun’s background was quite different: he had been a brass player in the touring group of Soviet Union’s biggest pop star, Alla Pugacheva, and wrote lyrics for her and other so-called ”official” pop stars, but gradually turned into an enthusiast of contemporary academic composition.

Together Borisov and Zhagun started to make hypnotic, musique concrète-inspired pieces on samplers, theoretised about concepts like optical sound, ”reframing”, ”noise reconstruction” and ”no music”, and put the results out on ultra-limited hand-made cassette editions. Later the artistic evolution of F.R.U.I.T.S. led them to another surprising direction: to become possibly the oddest club/dance/techno artists that have filled dancefloors in the former USSR. ”Studio Recordings Vol. 1”, originally released as a CD-R in 2000, is a summation of their first phase, which All Music Guide describes thus: ”It has the rich palette and obvious audio research of electro-acoustics, but also an immediacy, even a punkish attitude only striving (or starving) underground artists can express.”

Artwork and more info:
http://www.nbresearchdigest.com/studio