SOLD OUT!

The first release by N&B Research Digest, compiled in the middle of the future-oriented rush of the end of the century and released in April 2000, turned to the then-repressed Soviet past with its ”scientific Communism” for inspiration. Russian listeners could read this in the disc’s verbal content (lyrics of ”Cobol” speaking about ”an universal computer language”, track titles such as ”Soviet Freedom” and ”Moscow 80”, the disc’s title) and hear it in the appropriation 1970’s intercontinental muzak sounds and camp-fire guitars of so-called ”tourist songs”, whose historical background Wikipedia can now explain to Westerners: ”During the Brezhnev era of stagnation in the history of the Soviet Union, camping, especially its extreme forms such as alpinism, kayaking/canoeing, and canyoning, became a form of escapism for young people, who felt that these activities were the only ways of life in which such values as courage, friendship, risk, trust, cooperation, and mutual support still mattered.”

(Peter Shapiro, The Wire 204, February 2001, UK)

(Francois Couture, All-Music Guide, August 2002, USA)