Trabant

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Trabant was one of the most effective Hungarian underground and new wave music band operated between 1980 and 1985. The members were Gábor Lukin (composer, guitar, piano, recording, copying, archiving, covers), Marietta Méhes (song, lyrics) and János Vető (poems, percussion instruments, song).

The band began as a room-band. They made records with tape recorders, music instruments, and equipment (those were purchased in a toy store) at Lukin’s apartment. They hadn't hold concerts until years, the audience known them only from cassettes. The band played a central role in János Xantus’s film Eszkimó asszony fázik [The Eskimo Woman is Freezing) in 1984. Xantus’s movie is a typical representation of Hungarian film art of the 1980s, the so-called new sensibility, which merged neo-avantgarde style with postmodern irony. These films often showed contemporary new wave bands from Budapest. Trabant composed the music, the protagonist was Marietta Méhes and the whole story built up around her and the band’s. The songs played in the films were also important because these bands had no opportunities to release their records. Their tracks were disseminated as homemade tape recordings.

It was typical that the avant-garde, alternative rock bands also the Trabant cooperated, the members played in more formations. We can discover overlaps among the performers and the repertoire of the performances, too. Moreover, the representatives of the different artistic sphere collaborated, too. Music, fine art, theatre, film, literature interwove through the events and project of underground cultural life. So we can regard these communities around the bands as an intellectual, artistic studio. In the late 70’s and the early 80’s az avant-garde rock bands appeared with liberating power in the Hungarian rock music. They expressed those thoughts had never told earlier and emerged suppressed passions in the declining Kádár-era. They brought fresh air and offered new kinds of worldviews. The most bands (like Spions, VHK, URH, Kontroll Csoport) reacted with anger to the lies and suppressed topics of the communist regime whereas the Trabant gave the passivity of passions. This resigned attitude created a new type of poetic dream world.

The songs of the Trabant were similar to the Velvet Underground in New York. They used music genres very freely. The band played among the four walls, their home-copied cassettes were very much in demand.

The Trabant built up their own inner world and there was the feeling of they did music for only themselves. At the same time, they built a strange wall between them and their audience.

In 2011 a film was created on the story of the band titled “Ragaszthatatlan szív” what is the title of Trabant song (directed by Lili Horváth).