Ton's Musical Musings: Architects in music

In general, being an architect has little bearing on one's quality as a musician, but in Moscow, that's a different story. All students of architecture there are required to study music as well, so architects are professionally trained musicians as well. Peter Nalitch and some of his fellow students at the Moscow school of architecture started a cover band some years ago.

At first they merely emulated personal musical heroes like Deep Purple, but as time passed they expanded their musical horizon with reggae, rap, country, belcanto and even Bach. Demos sent out to record companies and radio stations yielded no response whatsoever, but all of that changed when the band put some self-produced music videos on YouTube. The song "Gitar" with its Boratesque lyrics and absurdism especially became a cult hit and transformed the band into an overnight sensation.

For their first official concert in Moscow, all five thousand tickets were sold out in a just a few days. This Summer the band made its very first international tour, and played a killer finale of the annual Sfinks Festival near the Belgian city of Antwerp, where I had the great pleasure of seeing them live.

Because of their unfortunate experiences with the music business, both the CD/DVD "Live at Club B1 Maximum" and the band's new CD "The Joy of Simple Melodies" are available for free download at http://www.peternalitch.ru. But if you haven't seen or heard "Gitar" yet, make sure you check that out here first and get infected.