Or in our alphabet: Konets Elektroniki – Soyuz, or in English, the band name, The End of Electronics and the album title, Union.

Soviet Union? Maybe… Just maybe. This is probably the best example of POST-SOVIET POST-PUNK and they’re from Russia proper, a city called Ryazan. This isn’t an artifact of the 80s, not technically speaking anyway. Konets Elektroniki is contemporary and Soyuz was recorded in 2018. Again though, think of Joy Division/New Order or Bauhaus, or the gothic 80s. It’s hard to say why I’m still stuck on this sound. My music listening tends to run seasonal and this vibe is totally late autumn for me for whatever reason. Nostalgia doesn’t always have any rhyme or reason. A lot of this music is themed though. There seems to be a lot of nostalgia for Soviet-era Russia. Perhaps the great capitalist smash and grab has left the Eastern bloc feeling somewhat… disenfranchised and left out.

Join the club, guys. Join the fucking club. Why do you think so many of us in New York City and London and Manchester and Paris were looking eastwards 40 years ago? Talk about irony.

Of course we may have been misguided, but we had our reasons for wanting to opt out. Welcome to our nightmare. You wanted opportunity and you got Putin to our Trump. You got haves and have-nots. You got what we already had, everything or nothing. Be careful what you wish for.

I’m down the rabbithole with all this stuff now. It could take a day, a week, or a month. It doesn’t really matter. There’s nothing but time really. Just learned today that our office will not be open until after Labor Day, at the earliest. It’s turned into a weird year and it doesn’t look like I’ll need those nice trousers I bought, at least not for a while. Insert hour smiley face emoji here. This is all just strange. It’s going to be stranger working into the autumn chill if a second wave hits us.

Hell, it’s not even a second wave yet, is it? Not on a national scale. It’s leveled off in NYC, this corona business, but there’s no reason not to expect it back. So why not dystopian vibes for dystopian living? We’re going to have to make the best of it now that the truth has come out. The truth is, of course, that we have never really been in charge and have always been a split hair away from one disaster or another. You can’t call all the shots all the time and even that obese, orange narcissist down in DC is eating crow and dialing back his shit, even though it took 150,000 dead before he would deign to put on a mask in public.

Hello 2020, you weird bitch.

Hello.