trabant - trabant

trabant
trabant
purge.xxx
Hungary/UK, 2024
LP

SEASONAL WORK AOTY 2024, IN STOCK HERE FOR THE FIRST TIME

My new favorite record. The band trabant formed in Hungary in the 1980s and were about as underground as you can get, distributing some of their music through clandestine tape-trading networks and hiding some of it in plain sight as the soundtrack to a film they starred in, Eskimo Woman Feels Cold, in order to evade the censors. Culled from those tapes, this is their first full-length LP.

The band had a rotating lineup that sometimes included Mihály Víg, who would go on to score the films of Béla Tarr. The music reflects this revolving door policy, trekking from autumnal film score instrumentals, to secretive Eastern Bloc reggae-post-punk, to the two heart-stopping extended ballads that close out the disc. On “Pirosbetûs Napok (Red-Letter Days),” they sound like the Velvet Underground & Nico covering the Cocteau Twins—only it’s better than that.

Why does this music, which almost no one in its native Hungary heard when it was new, feel like it’s speaking directly to me now? I honestly don’t know—sometimes a record just clicks. This feels timeless, essential, here already, a coffee ring set deep into the woodgrain of my life.

Beautiful handmade edition by purge.xxx, with a Xeroxed booklet including photos & English translations of the lyrics by George Szirtes (the translator of László Krasznahorkai’s books) alongside the Hungarian originals. Needless to say, I’d recommend this one.