Magyar wave

Walking with your nose in the air down any of the wide boulevards of the Hungarian capital, you can effortlessly amuse yourself by picturing this or that historical period, each one embodied in its own perfect artistic and architectural peak: Gothic, medieval, Moorish, Renaissance, Habsburg, socialist realism. A well-worn neon sign, perched atop a nineteenth-century building and advertising one of the city's storied local beers, the slightly bitter Borsodi, suddenly forces you to lower your gaze down to street level. And there it is: the modest, dishevelled humanity, forever busy yet never truly in a hurry, heir to everything Budapest has been and in many ways has never stopped being, responsible for softening the edges of the cityscape to better fit it to the here and now.

The Hungarian spirit is chronically melancholic. Never fully penetrable. Marked by a humble yet dignified gallantry, of a bygone kind no longer found elsewhere in Europe, one that fills conversations with titles, endless apologies and charming little courtesies.

Budapest is, on multiple levels, the crystalline expression of European Eleganz und Dekadenz, and it holds its own against the image of every other capital on the old continent, somehow always coming out on top: Paris without the snobbishness of its residents, Vienna with an almost Mediterranean vivre, Prague heralding the Balkans, a Warsaw that's more romantic and warm, a Berlin that's more vintage and languid.

A genetically retro spirit, as they say, nostalgia for a moment of glory and power placed punctually at some unspecified point in the past. And it's also in this light that we should read the success of the new far-right movements, Jobbik above all, which draw from this utopian past to assemble a fruit salad of symbolism and historical revisionism (the revival of the ancient Magyar alphabet, the rovás írás, the absurd aim of returning to the phantom nagy Magyarország, i.e. Hungary before the various territorial amputations to the north and south-east, as if prosperity and respectability were measured in geopolitical borders) in order to give today's Hungarians, especially those in the vast countryside, a disguised historical model to look back to in an otherwise deeply uncertain present. Because one of the consequences, the subtlest one, of the fall of the Berlin Wall was ultimately also this: the sudden loss of a solid, unified collective consciousness, a void that in Hungary has not even been filled by that rediscovered religiosity experienced in Poland or Slovakia and ridden by the media presence of ecclesiastical stars like John Paul II, nor by some philological brotherhood to exhume (Hungarian and Hungarians have no kinship with any other European language or ethnicity).

Hungary of the third millennium thus drags itself through a potentially explosive mixture of right-wing extremism and contradictory policies, orchestrated by the controversial Viktor Orbán, patriarch-in-chief of Fidesz, who has given more than a few headaches to the IMF and the European Union, responsible for the recent and unprecedented nationalist and "respectable" mask he has tried to force onto his country. The results are dubious, and the effects have almost always produced the opposite of what was intended. So, with paradoxical nonchalance, the homeless are forbidden from wandering the streets of certain districts, under penalty of a hefty fine, curiously solving the problem of poverty and the face to show tourists; the great, old, bustling Harom Tigris market, alive with hundreds of stalls run by Vietnamese, Chinese and Turkish immigrants and plenty of local Roma, has been cleared out to make way for a parking lot and a shopping centre; the many family-run or one-person tobacco shops, often peculiar mini-bazaars crammed with knick-knacks of every kind and era, have been definitively put out of business by the decision to centralise cigarette sales in government-licensed outlets, the so-called Nemzeti Dohánybolt (officially to monitor and curb smoking among the population, but according to locals actually a tool for concentrating one of the most profitable businesses in the hands of relatives and friends of local administrations – in fact, in Budapest, under this new system, smoking has become far easier: Nemzeti Dohánybolt outlets are popping up like mushrooms, some even open 24h).

Budapest is, once again, a city of contrasts and charm, the unique and irreplaceable centre of the Hungarian soul (the country's second-largest city has fewer inhabitants than Brescia), that is, of a specific and semi-universal human condition. And of its culture.

The music that winds through the streets and clubs of Budapest is a subtle but essential presence in completing the picture of a deep and complex city.

Although Euro-American hits arrive here just as promptly as they take off in London or Rome, the peculiarity of this country nestled between Transylvania and Pannonia lies first and foremost in the well-established presence of a local variant of virtually every musical genre. Punk and jazz above all, but also hip-hop, dark-wave, psychedelia, and, to a lesser extent, electronic music and reggae. On top of this come the numerous classical concerts, a tradition in which Hungary and Budapest in particular boast a robust heritage, held in the sumptuous Habsburg-era opera houses and concert halls – almost every day you can catch a performance of Bartók, Liszt, Ligeti or Kodály for next to nothing.

Added to this is the impressive number of small, impromptu concerts in the basement bars of the city centre (the kocsma), almost always featuring little ethno-folk bands made up of young local musicians, Roma players and the occasional expat, who tune their performance on the spot, often once the alcohol has already been flowing freely.

Let's try, then, to sum up in ten records the musical mood of the city that was the first to sing, on the banks of a Danube honoured here better than anywhere else, the melancholic and nihilistic lines of a "Gloomy Sunday" of carefree angels and flowers that no longer wake the dead.

KISPÁL ÉS A BORZ – Naphoz Holddal (Nagyferó Produkció, 1991)

Formed in 1987, Kispál és a Borz is the creation of four young men from the town of Pécs, András Lovasi, András Kispál, Rezső Ózdi and Gábor Bräutigam (Bräutigam would later be replaced by Zoltán Toth). Having grown up practically together, first at high school and then at the state gas supply company, the four wrote and played their first songs simply during work breaks, spending their days and nights alike between offices and supply plants.

After two demos recorded between 1988 and 1989, in 1991, amid that atmosphere of general excitement and cultural explosion in which the new Hungary was supposed to be born, the band's debut album, "Naphoz Holddal", was also released.

Kispál és a Borz's recipe starts from the most classic pop-rock template – bass, guitar, drums – to build melodically incisive songs with a thoroughly minimalist elegance, echoing both British indie-rock and the "soviet-rock" of Kino.

"Naphoz Holddal" would go on to shine as one of the cornerstones of Magyar alternative rock, with a tracklist packed with classics that remain hugely popular to this day. A rock-solid career, bolstered by four further albums, ended, like a consensual break-up, only in 2010, with a three-hour live show at the Sziget Fesztivál in front of over 45,000 spectators.

BIKINI – Hová lett… (Start, 1983)

Bikini is one of the most locally renowned names in the vast Magyar alternative universe. Born out of the ashes of the hardcore band Beatrice, Bikini found success thanks in particular to the charismatic figure of Ferenc Nagy (affectionately known as Feró), already the leader of Beatrice, who ferried over fans and a few reworked songs from his former band. Bikini's approach, however, heads in a markedly different direction, veering towards the driest and most almost-Dadaist new wave. Many of the lyrics resolve into nonsensical, parodic ramblings, while the music opens up to all sorts of incursions, winking at the most extreme Gang Of Four and Pere Ubu, while still retaining some traits of their earlier hard-rock incarnation ("Nem leszek sohasem").

“Hová lett…” is by far the standout work in a rich (seventeen albums) and varied discography, marked also by the various line-up changes, from Feró Nagy's departure to the arrival of Péter Gallai, who steered the sound toward a more synth-oriented direction.

Bikini are still an active and established presence, in Hungary but also in the neighbouring territories with Hungarian minorities (particularly Serbia and Romania), but their popularity, especially between the late Eighties and early Nineties, spread across Eastern Europe, reaching as far as the more alternative Scandinavian airplay.

A.E. BIZOTTSÁG – Jégkrémbalett (Start, 1984)

A.E. Bizottság (Albert Einstein Committee) was one of the most controversial experiments of pre-1989 Hungary. Formed in Szentendre, a charming little town on the Danube on the outskirts of Budapest that remains one of the most vital centres of the local avant-garde to this day, A.E. Bizottság was an open collective of multimedia artists and amateur musicians, rooted somewhere between Captain Beefheart and New York's no wave scene, with a distinctly provocative — when not outright nonsensical — attitude that recalls the most brilliant Frank Zappa. Deranged saxophones, groove-laden funk, post-punk guitars and drunken lyrics, commenting by turns on unsettling black cream ice creams or the Tibetan saint Milarepa, come together in one of the most significant experiences of the early-Eighties underground.

A.E. Bizottság would end up recording only one proper studio album, “Kalandra fel”, in 1983, although the most interesting piece of the project is probably “Jégkrémbalett”, from the following year, a kind of deranged soundtrack to the avant-garde theatre production of the same name. The group would, in fact, already fall inactive from 1985 onwards, with its regular members (Bán Mária, Bernáthy Sándor, Kukta Erzsébet Kokó, feLugossy László, Szulovszky István, ef Zámbó István, Wahorn András) permanently engaged in other parallel projects.

GÁBOR SZABÓ – Spellbinder (Impulse!, 1966)

Jazz is one of the most tangible presences in Budapest, downtown as much as in the outskirts, in the most well-worn beer halls as much as in the upper-crust theatres, and Gábor Szabó's is, in some ways, the biography most representative of his country's recent history, musical and otherwise.

Born in the capital in 1936 and introduced to the acoustic guitar at fourteen, Szabó fled Hungary at just twenty during the violent anti-Soviet uprisings of 1956, heading first to Boston and then to California.

In the United States, Szabó refined his style studying at the Berklee School of Music, but above all by immersing himself in the vibrant west coast cultural scene of the time, moving within the most innovative jazz and rock circles. Szabó drew from the most exotic strains of jazz, weaving in gypsy and folk variations from his distant homeland, but also typical rock devices, from electricity to feedback effects.

“Spellbinder” is in many ways his essential work, of an almost Latin warmth and sensuality (just listen to “Gypsy Queen”, a track said to have influenced even Carlos Santana, “Cheetah” and a smouldering “Bang Bang”) set against a markedly bluesy backdrop, an influence of his immediate surroundings but also, and above all, of the ghost of his homeland. Gripped by an uncontrolled drug addiction, Szabó would return to Budapest in 1982, where he would meet a sudden and cynically timely death.

KORAI ÖRÖM – III (Self, 1997)

Anyone who has spent more than a weekend in Budapest and kept an eye on the local performances has, in all likelihood, run into one of the countless Korai Öröm live shows. Active since the early Nineties, the group is one of the most established and original acts of the Hungarian underground.

Starting out from the trends most in vogue at the time of the band's earliest incarnation, particularly that grey area between neo-psychedelia and post-rock, Korai Öröm have developed a peculiar formula that's hard to pin down. Their music takes the form of open-ended, shape-shifting suites, ambient-spacey at their core, absorbing, depending on the occasion, “ethnic” percussion, dub grooves, and gypsy, Middle Eastern, Mediterranean and even Indian touches. In their albums, all simply titled with a running number, you can breathe that spirit of cosmopolitan tolerance that the Hungarian capital has always quietly preserved, music of dynamic breadth, absolute ecstasy and freedom. Wherever you dip into their discography, you'll come away with something excellent.

LÁSZLÓ HORTOBÁGYI – Transreplica Meccano (Hungaropop, 1987)

Another notable son of the “exotic” fascinations of the fõváros is certainly László Hortobágyi. Unlike the practices of the period, aimed mostly at an imaginary and imagined world music, very often conceived from within the confines of a recording studio, Hortobágyi pursued his “fourth-worldist” curiosities by relocating in person to India, where he would live on and off throughout the Seventies and into the early Eighties, studying sitar, tabla and rudra veena. From 1987 onwards he would devote himself to composition proper, releasing some of the most brilliant episodes of the more cultured and experimental strand of “world” music. “Transreplica Meccano” is a four-track LP, dominated mostly by the title track, a thirty-one-minute piece in which sacred and profane, the imaginary and the physical, alternate with unprecedented harmony, between sermons, looped choirs, ethno-ambient phrases, electronic psychedelia and percussive crescendos, ideally bridging the fourth world studies of Jon Hassell with the suggestions of Peter Gabriel's “Passion”.

Hortobágyi's inspiration has barely known a pause, arriving intact right up to the present day: he has also worked in "computer music", with the Oriental Music Archives, which he personally founded in 1984, as well as in music theory for the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Besides "Transreplica Meccano", all of his immediately subsequent productions are worth owning, in particular "Traditional Music Of Amygdala" and "Ritual Music Of The Formal-Hoot Al-Ganoubi".

VÍG MIHÁLY – Filmzenék (1G Records, 2001)

No one more than Béla Tarr has managed to depict, better than any word or speech ever could, the nihilistic-existential darkness of the human condition, that fog which shrouds everything in solitude and desolation and eventually burrows into the soul. No small part of the credit for the Hungarian filmmaker's achievement must go to his right-hand man, his "sonic" other half, Víg Mihály. It's a marriage of music and image that has more than once brushed against the sublime, from the decadence of the Titanik Bar in "Kárhozat" to Valuska's Bildungsroman in "Werckmeister Harmoniák". Víg Mihály's contribution is likewise a hushed, measured commentary, expressed depending on the moment through beautiful "chamber" vignettes, swing-jazz interludes, decadent waltzes or dark-ambient undertones. "Filmzenék" collects his work for "Öszi Almanach", mostly nostalgic piano ballads, for "Kárhozat", probably his compositional peak, featuring a splendid Vali Kerkes in that torch-song taken to the furthest extremes of resignation that is "Kész az egész", for the Hungarian director's monumental "Sátántangó", right up to the two mournful yet sweet sonatas of "Werckmeister Harmoniák", almost a bitter consolation, when "everything is over, nothing will matter anymore and there's nothing left worth doing".

Víg Mihály continues to perform regularly in and around Budapest, incognito (one of the names he has adopted is Balaton) and almost always in beer halls and unassuming venues, fleeing, like every card-carrying existentialist, easy concessions to success and to large audiences.

SEXEPIL – Egyesült álmok (Ring, 1988)

Formed in 1982 and still active on the scene – albeit with only four albums released – Sexepil are one of the earliest, and extremely influential, experiments in Hungarian new wave. While their basic formula inevitably recalls the most aristocratic names of the British "wave" (Joy Division, Siouxsie), their mood, their bare-bones aesthetic and the lo-fi streaks running through their sound actually place Sexepil closer to the contemporary Mitteleuropean scene (the Belgian-Dutch one in particular) but also to certain cold-wave undertones. Written between 1986 and 1988, "Egyesült álmok" ("collection of dreams") is the band's first and in many ways most brilliant LP, split between gloomy nihilistic ballads, more overtly post-punk accelerations and unusual gothic-ambient reverberations. It's a shadowy cornerstone that numerous other important names in Hungarian dark-wave would draw on, from the romantic, syncopated songs of Bonanza Bonzai to the more acidic recent drift of Broken Cups.

CSERMANEK LAKÓTELEP – Oh No! It's Csermanek Lakótelep (Földalatti KHE, 2007)

Cryptic from their very name onward, Csermanek Lakótelep are among the most curious and enigmatic acts in the contemporary rock underground.

Their music can be described as a set of urban-demented cheat sheets, often just a couple of minutes long and little more, in which one finds wave carcasses, minimal-synth, childlike nursery rhymes, mocked pseudo-anthems and plenty of dark humour.

The nods to Devo on one hand and to Zappa on the other are unmistakable, and the trio, hailing from Pécs, pays them near-explicit homage on their excellent third album "Oh No! It's Csermanek Lakótelep", a reference to the seminal American band right from the cover artwork, and a provocative attempt to give voice to an alienated, bohemian Hungarian everyman.

BESH O DROM – Macsó Hímzés (Fonó, 2000)

Thanks to its geographical position and the twists and turns of history, Budapest is the one city where a natural fusion of klezmer, gypsy, jazz, Balkan spirit and "western winds" can happen without any sense of strain. Among the many "ethno-crossover" acts perpetually touring the city, Besh O Drom are without doubt the best known, most beloved and most established. Presenting themselves as an open-door little orchestra, Besh O Drom ("hit the road" in lovari, a cross between the Romani and Hungarian languages) have, over the fifteen years since their formation, appeared on bills across half of Europe, but it is in Hungary that their activity remains most intense, performing, among other things, at MagyArt, in the film "Last Supper At The Arabian Grey Horse" and writing the music for an entire season at the Szeged National Theatre.

"Macsó Hímzés" was their first proper LP, released in 2000, an almost hour-long "space" in which Balkan brass meets old Hungarian melodies, klezmer phrasing, Romani dances and the most disparate world influences. It's one example among many of that nostalgically cosmopolitan vocation which can only be breathed in, and surrendered to without resistance, on the banks of the Danube, halfway between Vienna and Belgrade.

Ride the wave of great music

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