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Baile-funk, new rave stars Diplo and Bonde Do Role are set to appear in the first of a series of short films set about Russia’s underground club scene, which is being sponsored by the Baltika Russian Beer.
Announcing the films with a euphoric press release this week, the beer company’s (London) publicists declared ‘New Rave comes to Russia’ in a club scene they dubbed the ‘New Russian Underground’.
“If you read only the mainstream Western press, then you’d have been led to believe that the country’s streets are overflowing with danger,” the publicists declared, “That tourists are stopped in their tracks; that cigar-chomping mobsters run the club scene; that all is loud and flash in the ‘New Russia’. But there is another story,” they said.
Ironically the press release appeared just as the Guardian published a global club guide which referred to both Moscow’s’ ‘sugar-daddy factor’ (‘rich middle-aged men often bringing an entourage of five or six young women’) and conservative music tastes (‘you can’t play the same tunes as in London. People don’t understand techno’, one club PR told the paper).
“Moscow’s club scene is famous for many things – its oligarchs, its champagne-swilling beautiful people, its outrageous prices, and its devotion to house music,” said Guardian writer Luke Harding, going on to describe the scene at the Diaghilev Project – ‘Russia’s most shamelessly elite club.’
“I try to summon up a flicker of sympathy for Russia’s oppressed billionaire elite – but fail,” he said, “Nearby, a grey-haired man is holding hands with a teenage model.”
Meanwhile in Thailand the Bangkok post published a somewhat ambiguous report on the belated arrival of new rave headlined ‘Is New Rave Dead?”
“Even with the help of high speed Internet, fashion and music trends take a while to travel to these shores. But now it seems Bangkok has been catching up with the London-born craze, New Rave or Nu Rave, as soon as the trendsetters are putting nails on its coffin. “New Rave is dead” has been echoed of late,” the Post reported.
“As is usually the case, new rave looks to be the thing of 2006 (or 2005 even) for the shakers and movers, now that high street stores have come out with lines and lines of neon gear,” the Post added, “(But) surely there is no harm done. New rave or new grave, just get your glowsticks ready to throw at them (new ravers)”
