Using a broken $3 mic, an $80 guitar and an old Casio keyboard, Nambavan (Linar Bilalov) puts together dirty disco tracks that will pizdelovka you on the dance floor. Time and space traveler Bilalov brings you the nasty eighties punk pop that the USSR never had, coveting and cultivating dancefloor rhythms, analogue distortions and droll hip hop references.
 
His clips are a study in delirious DIY, Ostanemasya shows Bilalov on his home turf doing an eastern-block parody of gansta moves. With giant sunglasses and a corduroy jacket, he gyrates and gesticulates with melodrama, facetious sexual overtones and glib lip-synching against the backdrop of a Russian park on a bleary day. The place and atmosphere are like a prism that refracts the mock-earnest attitude; splinters of sardonic humour are sprayed everywhere, often tinkling back down over the star himself.
 
At his home in Kazan, Republic of Tatarstan, where few make their own music, Bilalov started out by enrolling in a music school to learn the guitar, but was expelled for not being able to remember songs. He moved on to the digital world, bought his first PC in 2000 and started composing. With a musical diet of, Blondie, Sex Pistols, Cerrone, Sonic Youth, Jimi Hendrix, Iggy Pop, The Doors, Giorgio Moroder, Donna Summer, Madonna, Supermax, and the Bee Gees to nourish him, he absorbs, mixes and mashes his influences to create an incomparable style that leaves you nostalgic for the future.
 
Nambavan has two releases on WM recordings, a net-label based in Heerlen, the Netherlands. His first, a four track called Chechnya on a Dance Floor, was out in August 2005, and was followed quickly by the second, Sex, Drugs and Russian Girls in December.
 
> www.nambavan.ru
 
Appearances:
> CTM.06