Thrash Behind the Iron Curtain: Kat, Turbo, Arakain, Tormentor

The hardest place in the world to be in a thrash band in 1986 was on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain, where the state owned the pressing plants, Western records were contraband, and the act of playing this music carried a risk no teenager in California ever faced.

The bands who managed it are the ones this history most often forgets, and several of them are better than the ones it remembers.

How it worked

In most of the bloc there was one record company and it belonged to the state. Getting a record pressed meant getting a state committee to approve the lyrics, the artwork and in some cases the band's name, and the committees were not stupid.

Equipment was the other problem. Western instruments and amplifiers were unobtainable or ruinously expensive, so bands played domestic copies, built their own effects, and repaired what they had indefinitely. A guitar in Poland in 1985 was frequently a Polish guitar.

And the records themselves arrived as contraband: brought back by somebody who had travelled, or posted and hoping to get through, then copied endlessly onto whatever tape was available. The degradation is the same story as Brazil, with a border guard added.

Poland

The most developed scene in the bloc. Kat from Katowice made 666 in 1986, released internationally as Metal and Hell, with lyrics that a censor somehow passed and that would have caused trouble in a Western country, let alone a Catholic one under a communist government.

Turbo from Poznan turned from hard rock into a thrash band across the decade and became genuinely popular at home. And Vader formed in Olsztyn in 1983 and spent most of the decade circulating on demo tapes because there was no other route, then emerged after 1989 as one of the best extreme metal bands in Europe.

Czechoslovakia and Hungary

Arakain from Prague were the most successful Czech band of the period and are still active. Torr and Master's Hammer worked at the more extreme end, the latter producing something that later black metal musicians treat as foundational.

Hungary had Tormentor, whose singer Attila Csihar went on to appear on one of the most notorious records in metal, which is a career path that only makes sense in a decade when everything was moving.

What it meant to do this

More than it meant anywhere else, and it is worth being clear rather than romantic about it.

Playing loud aggressive music with occult imagery in a state that regulated public expression was not a pose. It attracted official attention, it could cost a musician a job or a place at university, and in some cases it involved police interest of a kind that a Western band could treat as publicity and an Eastern one could not.

Against that, the audiences were enormous. A metal band in Poland in 1988 could play to thousands of people who had almost nothing else, and the connection between those bands and their listeners was of a different order from anything in a country with a functioning entertainment industry.

What happened after 1989

The borders opened and the scene detonated. Poland in particular has since produced more world class extreme metal per head than almost anywhere, and it did so on foundations laid in the 1980s by people playing through equipment they had built.

Vader, Behemoth, Decapitated and a long list of others come out of that, and the connection is direct: the older musicians had spent a decade learning to do this with nothing, and when the constraint lifted the capability was already there.

Another scene that operated in almost complete isolation, for entirely different reasons, is Japanese Thrash, and the general account is in Brazil, Canada and the Rest of the World.

How a record got made

The mechanics are worth spelling out, because they are unlike anything a Western band faced.

In Poland, the state recording enterprise controlled pressing. A band needed approval, and approval required submitting lyrics. Kat's 666 got through, which musicians from the period have described variously as a bureaucratic accident and as a censor who did not read carefully, and the record was subsequently licensed abroad under a different title.

Elsewhere it was harder. Hungarian and Czechoslovak bands frequently could not get pressed at all, which is why so much of the material from those countries exists only as demos, and why Tormentor's 1988 album was not officially released until years afterwards.

The alternative was the black market: tapes duplicated by hand, sold or traded privately, with no sleeve and no catalogue number. A substantial part of what these scenes produced survives only in that form.

The equipment problem

A Western guitarist in 1986 could buy a Japanese copy of an American guitar for a month's wages. An Eastern bloc guitarist could not buy one at all.

So bands played instruments made in Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany, built their own distortion units from schematics passed around, repaired amplifiers indefinitely and shared what existed. Drum heads were used until they split. Cymbals were played cracked.

That is audible on the records and it is not a defect. The tone of an Eastern bloc thrash album from 1987 is unlike anything from the West, and once you know why, it stops sounding like a limitation and starts sounding like a place.

Where to start

With Kat's 666, which is the record from this whole region that most rewards a first listen and which is findable in its international edition. Then Turbo, whose late 1980s albums show a band changing genre in public across three records.

Then, for the extreme end, Master's Hammer and the early Vader demos, both of which require patience with the recording quality and both of which explain a great deal about what Eastern Europe went on to produce.

Sources and notes

Years refer to original releases; several of these recordings circulated as demos for years before any pressing. Accounts of censorship follow the musicians' published recollections.