Kultur Shock

Mixing punk and metal with Balkan brass came naturally to Kultur Shock once a pair of Bosnians, two Bulgarians, three Americans, and a Japanese bassist converged in Seattle. Gino Yevdjevich, the band’s leader, had already turned professional at sixteen in Sarajevo, earning his keep with commercial music until the 1991 outbreak of war in the former Yugoslavia upended daily life. Amid shortages of cash, food, and power, the city’s artists created work for one another, and audiences risked sniper fire and shelling to attend. Sponsored by Joan Baez, Yevdjevich reached the United States in 1994 and landed in Seattle, where he appeared in the play Behind God’s Back, a musical account of the Sarajevo siege. Once the production ended, the musicians who became Kultur Shock began performing acoustic sets in restaurants. Krist Novoselic, drawing on his own Croatian family ties, urged them to turn up the volume; the louder approach promptly cost them those restaurant gigs. After a short break they resurfaced in Seattle clubs, now joined by guitarist Mario Butkovich, who relocated from Portland, while Brad Houser of the New Bohemians and Critters Buggin’ handled bass and Amy Denio plus Jessica Lurie completed the horn section. The 1999 self-released live album Kultur Shock Live in Amerika captured the group at that stage, treating traditional repertoire with distorted electric guitars that followed the horn lines through sudden shifts. Yevdjevich later described it as “a party album,” an energetic but incomplete portrait of their sound. Personnel shifts followed: Houser departed, Masa Kobayashi from Tokyo took over bass, and Bulgarian guitarist Val Kiossovski joined as second guitarist. With this lineup the band recorded its first studio album, signed to Kool Arrow—the imprint founded by Faith No More’s Billy Gould—and maintained a schedule of local shows and West Coast tours. FUCC the I.N.S. emerged in late 2001, succeeded by Kultura-Diktatura in 2004 and We Came to Take Your Jobs Away in 2006.