Album Notes

The energy of Bohemia is like the pregnant moment before a car crash. A Bohemia song is a moment in time where the energy is smooth and fluid, almost calming, with an underlying tension that builds toward the inevitable explosion. The songs are simple and haunting, the words and melodies like a story over coffee, the old urban legend you think you may have heard before, but haven't. Cuk, the singer and songwriter, subscribes to the "Keroauc school of disembodies poetry, crazy wisdom style." Bohemia songs are stories, the music a perfect marriage of hip hop and techno beats, deep groove bass lines, ruthless electronica, powerful guitars and melodic vocals over beautiful pop songs. What other band can begin a song with the refrain: "Did ya take a hit off the pipe, white trash mutha?" with calm detatchment and without a molecule of judgment or irony. Bohemia gestated in the beautiful mire of Aida House, a small bungalow crash house in Sugarhouse, an urban borough in Mormon Salt Lake City. Aida House was filled with fourteen year old run-aways and all night parties where it was not unusual to find limos and cop cars parked in front of the two cottonwoods, beer cans in piles three feet high. Bohemia would practice until two or three in the morning, when Cuk would leave with his skater gang to skate parking terraces until morning. Blair Sutherland, doctor of bottomless phat bass lines, golden boy of white trash meth town Ogden, went to some of the same schools as Cuk, though never meeting until later, until necessity dictated they would play together. "There were no other good bass players" (Cuk). Vanimal, the machine-like drummer, had the reputation as Salt Lake's best drummer. Vanimal: "Once I heard Cuk's music, I fell in love immediately and knew no other band would do." iinsectt, the computer programmer behind Bohemia, played guitar for other bands. "My brother told me about Bohemia so I checked them out -they blew my mind." iinsectt and Cuk became friends and iinsectt eventually joined as a second guitarist, designing electronic beats and writing the layered synth lines that add texture and dephth to Bohemia's mixes. Cuk: "We would hang at iinsectt's apartment all night, eating acid, smoking dank and listening to the most obscure shit you could imagine. Opened up doors where we had ideas for our music." When you listen to Bohemia's music you get a sense something incredible and unqualified is happening. The music is explosive and tender, the songs filled with storytelling that destroys the old surrealist associative lyric found in most modern music. Bohemia is a modern revelation, a perfect fusion of old and new, the old myths and poetry of the street, with a slammin' sound, ruthless and earthy.