piatok 23. mája 2025

Interview with Dušan Hedl / CZD (pt.I) 2025

 

CZD ("Center Za Dehumanizacio" or "Center for Dehumanization in English") is a Slovenian alt/punk rock band formed in 1984 in Maribor. The band soon developed its own variation of punk rock music, characterized by a strong leaning towards experimentation. Integrating and adapting various genres including industrial, electropop, a cappella and hardcore punk, CZD are also known for their lyrics and strong stage presence. In addition to music, the group is also active in other artistic fields, having worked and collaborated (as individuals and as a group) in writing, video art, political activism and cultural infrastructure; they have made a significant contribution to the Slovenian cultural scene (especially that of the Northeast) over the past three decades.

















Interview with Dušan Hedl/CZD (pt.I)
















Mišo/M:

Dušan/D:


M: Hi Dušan, tell us briefly about yourself and what you are doing today? What is your job?

D: My colleagues and I work in the book publishing house Kulturni center Maribor (https://zalozbaknjig.com/) . This publishing house is becoming an increasingly important player inSlovenia's otherwise small book market of 2 million inhabitants. The main book stock isFrontier, which has been in existence for more than 30 years, and another extremely important collection isZnanstvena monografija (Scientific Monograph), which helps young educated people in their careerspath. Kulturni centrum Maribor also has a music publishing house, namely 4 sub-publishers.punk rock and garage rnr, which has been operating since the mid-1980s, Monofonika, which publishesprogressive electronica, mostly recordings of ex-Yugoslav bizarre electronic music (compilations ExYu Electronica), founded in Yugoslavia by the legendary multiperformative artist MarioMarzidovšek and Akord record, which releases ethno, world and pop music, and Classica Slovenica for classical music.
















M: You have been working in the cultural field for 40 years, what do you still enjoy?

D: Tell me, who likes to work? But it's easier if you started out and did what you played with in your youth and made a living at it. To survive in the cultural scene, especially independently, as I've always led itindependent organizations, is extremely difficult. The EU is well on its way to destroying independent cultural scene and thus destroy creativity, EU money for cultural activities is only spent by elite people.I've enjoyed it less in recent years as I've had to invest all my time in running a publishing househouse if we wanted to survive, and I have neglected my musical (CZD - Centre for Dehumanization,Punkappella, Kloopotec, Studenstsko delavski rock teater v opposiciji) and art projects (Pop art,paintings, avant-garde collages,... ) and writing for media and book publications. We try to be as in the Maribor Cultural Centre team as professional as possible, which means that for rational investment we offer artists satisfactory publishing services.
















M: Slovakia is a relatively small country (a country with half the area and population). How are youdid you discover punk in the 80s? What were your main sources? I was lucky enough to see PANKRTI live in Belgrade at a concert in Kalemegdan in 2010. Which bands were essential for you?

D: Do you think Slovenia has half the population of Slovakia? Yes. Even before punk, I was deeply interested in music, as a primary school pupil I listened to glam rock, then everything from Paco de Lucia to classic rock, electronica and folk music, everything the world market has to offer (from movies, comics, music,....) to be blind to reality. But in the mid-70s I always wished to live in the 50s, when music for the young people was exciting, thrilling, or so I thought, because I didn't know the 60s well then and the hippie movement was too slow for me and the philosophy of drugs never appealed to me. I also a kid from the countryside and the city (Maribor) was a frustrated hippie quasi-philosophically stressed out, positions in the pop culture business were already taken, concreted, positioned... so punk was like an order for a young person to come up with something "peculiar"... I've since I've absorbed everything I can from the media. I used to buy the NME (interestingly, you could buy the NME in Maribor from a street vendor selling newspapers), I read all the music magazines, on Austrian television we could watch, because I live on the border, we saw the records quite quickly seen records by Sex Pistols, Clash, etc.... we were ordering records from London, etc.... then it was just a matter of time before we formed our first bands (Masaker), we started corresponding with other punks all over the world and in the former Yugoslavia. I remember the letters of Satan Panonski ("Why am I in jail?, because of the murder...")...













M: Czech and Slovak bands are represented on the compilation Various - No Border Jam 3. Do you remember how you got in touch with the bands ZÓNA A and JESUS UNDERGROUND BAND?

D: I don't even remember how we met, but it was a big international fanzine correspondence scene. I think it was the early days of the internet. Jesus Underground was a great band in particular, imagine the fantastic name of the band. They played at one of the first No Border Jam festivals, which I organized in Ormoz (together with the Unterhund club). The band Jesus Underground came back to us later and invited us to a festival in Slovakia near Banská Bystrica, a great place on a nearby mountain. At incredible place. CZD, Pridigarji and Delaware played there. Later, the No Border Jam festival moved to the Pekarna cultural centre in Maribor, which we founded right after the occupation of Metelkova in Ljubljana, where we learned how it works. In front of Pekarna occupation, we organized protest concerts in Maribor and Ptuj, where we played underground at Muršićeva. It's interesting how all these places later became sort of pop culture centres. As if they were reacting to underground movements or to protect themselves from them.













M: Were you in contact with Slovak bands, labels in the 90s?

D: Yes, of course, we always exchanged records with some of them...
















M: You had an extensive publishing activity. How did you get into it? Was it the lack of interest in you in mainstream media and alternative music in general, or did you want to have more of it in your hands?

D: Both, of course. First, in the late 80s, there was interest in releasing recordings of my band CZD, shortly thereafter, I founded the underground label Front Rock and released quite a lot of top underground Polska malca, Pridigarji, Scuffy Dogs, No Border Jam compilations, which at that time was international compilations and brought incredible music information all over Europe, important was scene from the former Yugoslavia, which needed a lot of help during the war in the 90s, etc. see http://www.ljudmila.org/subkulturni-azil/

Then we started publishing books, first about the punk and underground scene and subcultures in Slovenia and the world. Soon it grew into a literary publishing house with quality Slovenian authors publish. Some have been with us for 35 years, which is incredible, and we are very proud of them and us together. Sometimes writers and musicians don't realize how important it is for a career to publish in the same publishing house because sooner or later you end up with collected works, clear compilations that you can't collect if you wander from one to the other like a butterfly or a prostitute with the "hope" of better conditions. The conditions are governed by a reciprocal relationship between them, and above all the relations are regulated by a positive and sophisticated attitude towards artistic creation, to the final product, to the artistic career, with a whole plan of what to you want to get with the whole plan of what you from your artistic work. If the artwork is just an ego trip, then you are a butterfly.

At Založba knjig (Book Publishing House) we also publish translations into Slovenian, and now also publishing some books in English and German.













M: How many of these books have you published?

D: The catalogue of Založba knjig Kulturni center Maribor currently contains approximately 450 books of all from novels to poetry, children's books, science books, comics, etc., and is still growing, half of which are currently published as e-books. Approximately 100 albums have been published; this catalogue revision will need to be collected soon.
















M: Front Rock label, tell us about its history and releases.

D: Front Rock started in the mid 80's with the beginnings of CZD _ Center for Dehumanization. On the site . Front Rock's catalogue is really interesting and there's no band that has released anything in
Front Rock that hasn't had an impact in their area locally or globally, that is, regionally, or on
scene with their subgenre or the version of punk that they were performing. For example, the Delaware band, LP, which sold extremely fast in its day, a lot of the buyers were in the English underground. Pridigarji played their story in ska punk and touring with CZD around Europe. The well-known ethnoblues band Kvinton was formed on the ruins of one of the first punk bands in Slovenia, Masaker.



















M. Terms such as subcultural azil, border, what do you have in common with them, what do these terms institutions do?

D: Subcultural azil was a publishing house that brought together all the subcultural publishing houses and book collections, it's the predecessor of the Maribor Cultural Centre.






M: Radio Student. How important was this radio on the independent scene in Slovenia?

D: I think it has had some influence. Although Radio Študent was always just a medium, a radio that summarised what was happening on the ground. It also tried to shape and influence the music underground, according to its own tastes, but also according to current editorial policy. Radio Student had a big influence on the beginnings of punk, in the late 70s and early 80s, although until improvements the internet, it could only be heard in Ljubljana. In Maribor, in the late 80s, we founded Mariborski radio student - MARŠ. The story with MARŠ is similar, it also did not have a significant influence on the music scene in Maribor and its surroundings. Politics influenced these two radios too much from behind. Media Independence is no longer possible in the independent scene, which is what we can expect in the central media space.

To be continued...




utorok 20. mája 2025

Svinokop - demo 2003

 

SVINOKOP - rýchly hardcore z Petrohradu. So Šarapovom-Dmitrijom Ivanovom, ich členom, som sa mal kedysi stretnúť priamo v Petrohrade, žiaľ neklaplo to vtedy, mal v ten deň iné povinnosti.
















https://archive.org/details/Svinokop_Svinokop-demo-2003

utorok 18. februára 2025

utorok 7. januára 2025

Interview with Ludomir - Mózgojad fanzine

 

Interview with Ludomir - Mózgojad fanzine


1. At the beginning,  please tell me how the fanzine Mózgojad came into being? What preceded it?


Mózgojad appeared in 1992 after several conversations with different people. In Słupsk at that time there were quite a few people who made up the punk / hc / reggae scene. We all knew each other, met and so on. At one of these meetings we decided to make a zine. Two of us (Gilbert and I) already had a little experience with zines. We used to run the festival paper during Totus Mundus - an independent theater festival. We interviewed artists, wrote reviews and designed the layout. The whole thing had to be put together from day to day. Usually we would write in the evening, and in the morning we would collect the material, arrange it on a template, and photocopy it to distribute during the next day of the festival. With Mózgojad we had more time, but basically the method was similar :)













2. Where did the inspiration for it come from? Was there any other zine published in your city? Do you have any foreign fanzines inspiration? Do you also have issues available in PDF format?


In Poland at that time there were a lot of people actively building the hc/punk scene. There were a lot of zines, music publishers, bands, cultural centers. There was no internet, but we communicated through letters, met at festivals. There was also a big exchange market of independent publications in Warsaw called "Giełda". In Słupsk we always had access to that world, because people traveled and brought zines, tapes, records. Photocopying was quite accessible and cheap, so it wasn't hard to make your zine, you just had to get the content. For the first issue we worked in a larger group - everyone wrote something, we did some interviews by mail, some live, pasted ads of other publications and drawings. Someone also came up with a name, which was the nickname of one of our friends - Kamil - and meant "braineater". Everyone contributed something, and Gilbert and I typed it all up on typewriters and pasted it into a mock-up. We then managed to convince the local Culture House to provide us with a photocopier on which we could duplicate the zine and send it out into the world. It was printed regularly as orders came in through the post office - the money from those orders covered the printing costs. Soon we started organizing concerts at the same Culture House, so it was easy to fill up some of the content that way. We also cooperated with the eco and anarchist organizations and wrote articles on social issues. We tried to react vividly to the problems around us. The articles were also written by people from other places - mainly from Poland. We didn't have much contact with foreign scenes. Sometimes it was possible to extend some bands tours to Słupsk, then we had an occasion to talk to them and print it in the zine - for example, interviews with Pig Ignorance and Under the Gun were made after their gig.

As for the Mózgojad in pdf-format I don't have at the moment, but maybe it will appear soon, because I found original mock-up of first two numbers at my mother's attic :)
















3. Have you had any collaborations or worked with scenes in neighbouring countries? I'm interested in Czech and Slovak ones, have you collaborated with anyone?Do you know any fanzines or magazines from Slovakia and Czech Republic? 


At that time we didn't have contacts in Czech and Slovakia. Słupsk is north of Poland, so somehow we were more focused on Scandinavian scene – I remember some connections to Finland and Sweden later on. We knew there were many things happening in Czech and Slovakia, but did not have access to that.
















4. Who took care of the graphics of your zine, who chose the themes of the magazine? What was the punk and alternative scene like in your city? Bands, clubs, festivals? 


As I said - we did it in a larger group, but basically two of us - me and Gilbert - were responsible for the editorial. The first issue was mainly composed by Słupsk forces – through the all 3 issues fo Mózgojad we had even a series of articles called “Słupsk underground story”. There was quite a scene in Słupsk at that time - several bands were active, including Ewa Braun and Karcer, who were already stars of the hc/punk scene. In the neighboring town of Ustka there was Parafraza, which held monthly concerts to which we would travel from Słupsk with the whole brigade of punks. When we organized our first concert as part of our activities in 1992, more than 300 people came. It was quite surprising, because no one expected such a turnout – usual concert public was like 50-100 people. Suddenly there were a lot of people our age (we were 15/16 at that time), but also older and younger punks. 

There were also several bands rehearsing in garages in Słupsk. We started meeting, talking, doing things. This grew into a large active group, which then moved into more social, environmental, anarchist activities. There were several houses of culture in the region that supported such activities by organizing concerts, then the first anarchist infoshop was created by Gilbert and Jacek. 

As for Mózgojad, it started as a local initiative, but already the second issue was an incredible success. I had to keep adding new copies because orders were coming in from all over Poland. The second issue went out in more than 1,000 copies, which was quite a surprise in the days before the Internet. Again, people from Poland got involved. Drawings were sent to us by a guy from Sierpc - Sulo, but we also drew ourselves. I do not remember exactly how everything went. At that time we just did things without thinking about it. We felt the power of such activity and a real impact on reality.
















5. Did you have any problems with the developing neo-Nazi scene at the time? What was the article about the band Babayaga Ojo?


In Słupsk there were ab. 5 skinheads. We had some problems with them because they were quite big and unpredictable, but it was not a big scene. However, they had good connections with Wroclaw, which was a neo-Nazi center at that time. We managed to keep them away somehow, but sometimes it was hard. We were always anti-fascist and we were quite explicit about it... the Babajaga-Ojo case is a good example. In the first issue of Mózgojad we cooperated with Maciek from Bełchatów, who had his own zine Wkrent. He printed our stuff, we printed his. And he sent us this little article about Babajaga-Ojo – a band which we didn't know, but we heard something that they might be sympathetic to the neo-Nazi scene. So we decided to print his text together with a flyer we got at the same time denouncing the band as fascists. Maciek wrote that the band was cool and the flyer said that they were neo-Nazis. So a few weeks later, after the first issue came out, we got a letter from Zbowid (a friend from Poznań) confirming that Babajaga-Ojo likes Nazis. We decided to add an extra page to our zine with a printout of this letter and some extra anti-nazi graphics. So the new copies were already made with this extra page. In the second issue we had a big column with letters (which we received quite a lot) where this thing was further discussed. We were always for discussion, but at the same time we did not want to give any ground to Nazi stuff. To make it even more clear - in the second issue we printed this little poster with a pig in a helmet and the description: "Nazi pigs fuck off". We had a lot of problems with skinheads because of that, but we also had a big support from other people from the hc/punk scene.


















6. What are you doing today? Are you using your fanzine experience in your current job? Are you interested in today's fanzine scene?


I'm an artist - I work mostly with visual and performative arts, and I use the experience of making zines (I also design books, for example), but most of all I use the experience of being part of that big movement of the 90s: the ideas of independence, social justice, activism that were at the center of that movement are very important in my contemporary work. I also work with musicians whose roots are in the same scene, like Marcin Dymiter (also from Słupsk) and Robert Piotrowicz. I'm also interested in the art book and art zines. The idea of self-publishing is a very important part of it, and I'm really happy that this idea is still so active and meaningful.


Ludomir, thank you for the answers

Mišo/MUZIKA-KOMUNIKA




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