Russian mafia soundtrack

Thursday morning is dark, wet-ish, and cold-ish, again.  It's not really cold (though I wouldn't want to walk around in shorts and a t-shirt), just sort of cold.  It isn't raining so much as spitting.  Just enough to make the car's windshield wipers of debatable necessity.  Had four different cars, at four different parts of my short drive in to campus, jump out directly in front of me.  Despite the aggressive leaps to pull in front of me rather than wait for me to pass, not one of those four cars was even interested in doing the legal speed limit for their respective streets.  Not sure, then, why they had to make spectacular bolting maneuvers to cut me off (it's not like there was a long string of traffic behind me they were going to get stuck waiting for).  No, I took no retaliatory action, no horn, no blinking lights, no sign language.  What would it matter if I did; what, really, could I do about it anyway?  I'll trust to the great karma equalizer to sort them out.  My commute is short, so they had little impact on my trip other than having to remain defensively alert.  In a small car, that's de rigueur anyway.

Today's random playlist pulled out a soundtrack from the Russian mafia film брат 2 (yes, a sequel to the first film...wait for it... брат), released in 2000.  брат (pronounced brat, rather like the first half of the word bratwurst) is the Russian word for brother (and if you have a brother and speak English, you probably appreciate that linguistic coincidence).  The soundtrack is mostly Russian rock of the sort that would be classified as underground and/or alternative here.  I bought this CD in Vladivostok after I finally found a store that sold legitimate copies of the CD.  CDs, then and there, were largely used only by street-side music vendors to dub cassette copies of the album which they then sold (cassettes being much more popular than CDs in Russia at that time).  I have exactly four Russian CDs stored in my iPod, which makes them a very small minority of music. Consequently, they pop to my attention when they do come up.


When I travel abroad I like to bring back one or two examples of contemporary popular music, which is often more revealing than the traditional music from the country.  In the case of Russian rock, there was a consistent flavor to it (beyond the heavy dependance on electronica that was all the rage in European music at the time) that it took me a while to identify.  Like most of their traditional folk music, most Russian pop music was set in a minor key.  This creates an oddly and uniquely Russian rock sound.  If you're interested in sampling the CD, Amazon sells it through their marketplace vendors and has the tracks available for online sampling.  Looks like you can also buy the movie on DVD, if you are so inspired.  The track that popped up on my playlist this morning was the second track listed there (or third listed in my playlist, below).  (Click here if you want to see all the tracks listed in Russian.)  Most of the tracks on this CD are followed by a few sentences of dialog (in Russian, of course) taken from critical parts of the film, which further differentiates these tracks when they pop up.

Several songs later, as I typed this entry, another tune popped up from the брат 2 soundtrack: Zemfira (I also bought one of her CDs while in Russia) doing Iskala.  So it's a Russian soundtrack morning, I guess, sandwiched between two excellent jazz tracks and an interesting cut from a recent Great Northern recording.  Another really odd mix. While each tune, on its own, is very good, as a mix this set probably only works for me because I know the tunes.  As a radio station mix it would probably send folks spinning for a new station or firing up a different Pandora mix in short order:

• The Jazz Networks: Beauty And The Beast
• Great Northern: Houses
• Masha I Medvedi: Zemlya
• Tiger Okoshi: Yuki No Furu Machi O

PS: normally I italicize track and album titles, but I opted to bold the soundtrack title of брат 2 because when you italicize Russian, some of the characters change to their cursive forms, which is even more confusing when reading from an English-language perspective.  The Russian word брат is easy enough to make out, but the italicized version of the same word (брат) is harder to make out.  Looks rather like someone couldn't decide if the event took place at 6:00 AM or PM.  Now, here's hoping any of the Russian words survive the leap to the digital blog page!