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F.R.U.I.T.S. is one of those fantastically improbable evolutionary products, which 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 Pugachova, and wrote lyrics for her and other so-called "official" pop stars, but gradually turned into an enthusiast of contemporary academic composition.
F.R.U.I.T.S. circa 1993
Together Borisov and Zhagun started to make hypnotic, musique concrète-inspired pieces on samplers, theoretised about concepts like optical sounds, "reframing", "noise reconstruction" and ”no music”, and put the results out on ultra-limited hand-made cassette editions (their cover art will be placed here soon).
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 act that has filled dancefloors in the former USSR, documented on their third CD, the live compilation ”Forbidden Beat” released by Austria’s Laton label in 2004. ”Studio Recordings Vol. 1” is a summation of their first phase, which the Canadian music critic Francois Couture described this way in All Music Guide, after the album had come out as a CD-R in 2000: ”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.”
(Sergei Kosheverov, DownTown #2, 2000, Russia)
(Till Kniola,
Auf Abwegen #30, Winter 2000/2001,
(Francois Couture, All-Music Guide, September 2002, USA)
