Minimalist line-up, maximalist sound. The name Russian Circles does not hide Russians, but a trio of Americans playing hard music, including compositions called by Czech names such as Vlastimil, Mládek or Vorel. The successful instrumental group has already performed, for example, at the Brutal Assault festival. This coming Saturday, October 12, he will present himself at the Archa+ venue in Prague.
Russian circle is not a ferris wheel or an association of friends of Russian culture, but a warm-up for skating during ice hockey training. The founding members of the formation, guitarist Mike Sullivan and drummer Dave Turncrantz, grew up in the city of St. Louis and as fans of the local Blues team, they have been playing sports on the ice since childhood.
They don’t play blues or hockey today, but they apply ice coldness, rudeness and hard power in their work, which is referred to as post-metal. Together with bass guitarist Brian Cook, they build massive noise cathedrals at concerts, which they then completely dismantle within a few bars and then rebuild again.
Their compositions, with rare exceptions, do not contain lyrics or vocals. They are often named after places and people the musicians are close to. He usually comes up with the name in the rehearsal room as a temporary designation of a cluster of abstract tones. They did the same with Harper Lewis, according to Setlist.fm their most played live.
“Harper Lewis is the son of our friend David, our former agent,” explains the band’s bassist Brian Cook in an interview for Aktuálně.cz about the creation of the composition. “We named her shortly after Harper was born. I don’t think we put much thought into it. Harper is 17 today, which I find completely bizarre,” Cook, 47, notes. At the time of Lewis’s birth, a new era of Chicago’s Russian Circles began. The track was released on their second album Station, where the original bassist of this three-pronged thunder machine was replaced by Brian Cook.
Punk in Hawaii
He began to perceive music intensely as a child in Hawaii. Parents served there on an American military base. From about the age of seven, Brian Cook bought tapes, he liked The Cure and Depeche Mode. He liked that they sounded different from the pop stars of the time. But soon he started discovering punk.
Russian Circles sold out the last few concerts in Prague. Pictured is bassist Brian Cook. | Photo: Tomáš Hejlek
“I fell into skateboarding, devouring magazines like Thrasher and watching punk skate videos,” he recalls. He noted that while most radio hits fade into obscurity after wear and tear, “bands like Minor Threat or the Dead Kennedys were ten years after they broke up and people were still buying their records like something sacred”. Minor Threat existed in the early 80s, the Dead Kennedys later reunited without a frontman.
In Hawaii, the young man could only imagine the punk scene while listening to the Walkman. Only when he and his parents moved to another base at the age of fifteen, this time to the small town of Tacoma near Seattle, did he find himself “in the world of clubs, bands and fanzines” or amateur music magazines. For example, he considered the local alternative rockers Seaweed to be a revelation.
“I was already listening to them in Hawaii and suddenly I was living in the same city. Rock stars tend to be distant and inaccessible. But I saw Seaweed on stage, they had just returned from an Asian tour. And I realized that if they could do it, so could I ,” Cook recalls.
At the beginning of the 90s, he was at the origin of Botch playing complicated mathcore, at the turn of the millennium he continued with These Arms Are Snakes, labeled post-hardcore. Both ensembles enjoyed respect on the local guitar scene and followed the “do it yourself” philosophy of hardcore punk from the 80s of the last century.
Then in 2008, when Cook went on the concert tour with Russian Circles for the first time, something strange happened. “It was way better than all the tours I’d been on up to that point. I was like, ‘Yeah, this instrumental band is for some reason more popular than anything I’ve done so far,'” he recounts.
He explains that the Russian Circles were in the right place at the right time. With the new millennium, the excitement of testosterone groups fronted by scream singers began to wane. The audience got older, refined their tastes and was ready for more “adult” music. Russian Circles had neither strong slogans nor a charismatic face behind the microphone, but they impressed with the intensity of their speech.
Single Gnosis from Russian Circles latest album of the same name. Photo: Christoph Eisenmenger | Video: Sargent House
Czech footprint
Their natural environment is clubs. They have played about a dozen concerts in the Czech Republic so far, including several sold-out concerts in Prague’s Lucerna Music Bar.
But two years ago, the musicians got a glimpse into the upper echelons of guitar show business when they performed several shows with the famous bands Korn and System of a Down.
“To be completely honest, the invitation came in the mail with a subject line that said System of a Down, Korn and Faith No More,” recalls Cook, who was intrigued by the latter. “When I was 13, Faith No More were everything. The radio was playing their songs like Epic and Falling to Pieces, it was completely new music. No one in the world sounds like Faith No More. They were the ones who largely introduced me to hard music,” he explains.
Faith No More eventually canceled their joint concerts due to illness. However, Russian Circles remained in the project, so in February 2022 they performed in Los Angeles in front of about ten thousand people, most of whom had not heard of them until then. “We realized that if someone doesn’t like it, nothing will happen. Because we’re not aiming for this level of popularity,” comments the bassist.
He considers the crucial turning point in the band’s life to be the moment when he realized that the listeners in the first rows knew their songs. “I see a lot of people out there drumming in the air in the transitions,” he replies, as fans display knowledge of unsingable repertoire.
Russian Circles conceptualize their performances as a boundless stream in which one song smoothly transitions into another. “When there’s applause at the moment when the song really ends, I think: ah, these guys know,” mentions the musician.
The Czechs last heard them at last year’s Brutal Assault festival, where a few hundred people watched the Americans around one o’clock in the morning. However, clubs remain their strongest discipline. “I want people to get absolutely lost in the sound for those 75 minutes,” explains Cook.
Vorel called the song Russian Circles after the Czech tour manager. Photo: Christoph Eisenmenger | Video: Sargent House
In addition to Harper Lewis, their most played compositions include those called Vorel, Vlastimil or Mládek. The Czech footprint in Russian Circles dates back to 1999, when Cook and Botch completed a European tour alongside the Czech LVMEN. Miroslav Švec, nicknamed Čepic, now co-owner of the Nomads of Prague company, which rents instruments to foreign bands, played bass in them.
“Most of the equipment we carried with us was complete scrap. Čepic told us that the next time we go to Europe, we should call him and he will provide us with quality equipment. So Russian Circles planned the first European tour automatically with Nomads of Prague,” Brian Cook mentions.
The song Mládek is named after the tour manager Tomáš Mládek. The song Vladislav was inspired by a story about Mládek’s relative, Vorel is another driver of the “Prague nomads”.
The band is friends with all those named not only on tour. “The Czech Republic is part of the world of Russian Circles. We stay in Prague for a day or two each time, because we feel like we are at home, even if we are far from home,” concludes Brian Cook.
Concert
Russian Circles
Archa+, Prague, October 12.