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 Stop Those Songs (1983)

This contemporary December 21, 1983 article from the NYT says more than I care to.

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VEFFECT, a rock band that has been associated with the experimental music scene on Manhattan's Lower East Side, recently returned from a European trip that included performances in Czechoslovakia. Western rock bands have rarely ventured into Eastern Europe because governments there tend to be suspicious of rock. Yet a little-known New York band, with no record company or high-powered manager to back it up, succeeded where many rock stars have failed.

V-Effect was performing in Western Europe and recording its first album in Switzerland when an associate, Fred Frith, a British guitarist, provided a contact with the Jazz Section, an officially sanctioned organization in Prague that publishes a music magazine and puts on concerts. ''We were told that official permission to play there is difficult to obtain and that concerts are often canceled at the last minute,'' D. Zonzinsky, V-Effect's saxophonist-vocalist, said the other day. ''We decided to take our chances, and it only took around 20 minutes to drive from Vienna to our first concert at a student center.''

Prague was not that simple. ''There was an official campaign against new-wave rock going on,'' Mr. Zonzinsky reported. ''And the kids were fighting it, writing in to the newspapers saying 'Don't knock the rock.' Apparently this was the first time significant numbers of Czech young people openly complained about Government suppression of popular music. Our concert in Prague was canceled, so we ended up playing for invited guests in someone's backyard. People were very excited by the music, and we got into some interesting discussions with them. They felt very alienated from the Soviet bureaucracy, and they were as disturbed by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as we are by American involvement in El Salvador.''

During the last two years, Mr. Zonzinsky has been working with the bassist Ann Rupel and the drummer Rick Brown as V-Effect, creating fresh idiosyncratic music inspired principally by Ornette Coleman and the Sex Pistols. V-Effect attracted critical attention last year, when two of their songs were highlights on a Zoar Records anthology album of Lower East Side bands called ''Peripheral Vision.'' Now there is a V-Effect album, ''Stop Those Songs'' (Rift Records), most of which was recorded in studios in Switzerland and New York but with a few excerpts from the trio's performances in Czechoslovakia.

V-Effect's songs frequently express the band's political commitment, but they are refreshingly free of hectoring and camp. The group shows exceptional ingenuity in the wild variety of moods and feelings it expresses, with what most musicians would consider a severely limiting instrumentation. The music has a terseness and lucidity, and a supple elasticity of rhythm and line, which one encounters more frequently in jazz than in music that is nominally rock.

''Right now, we're uncertain about the future of the group,'' said Mr. Zonzinsky. ''There really isn't a nurturing or sustaining downtown rock scene anymore, and with the scarcity of decent club gigs, bands like ours are struggling. Maybe the album will open up some opportunities for us.'' ''Stop Those Songs'' is distributed by Rough Trade of San Francisco and London and is available by mail from New Music Distribution Service, 500 Broadway, New York 10012."