Cleaning Women

What kind of joke is this? Three guys in skirts and makeup, jumping like monkeys over homemade instruments (hair dryers! buckets! tin cans!), shouting meaningless slogans about the benefits of cleaning. How can you take such a thing seriously? You must. Anyone who's been lucky enough to see Cleaning Women crammed into a packed art-house club will have no doubt about the impeccable quality of this product. All members of this industrial project wear women's business suits, but the energy and temperament Cleaning Women are known for is anything but feminine. Hair dryers, bass necks, wild sound and amazing band chemistry—set to avant-garde punk-jazz that initially gives you goosebumps and has everyone dancing by the end. "Punk-jazz" isn't the only label the inhabitants of planet Cleanus Tero (Robot #4), Risto (Robot #3) and Timo (Robot #1) give their music. They also prefer "Intergalactic Industrial Disco-Rock" or "Ambient Afro-Techno-Riff-Crunch". That's the sound of their first album "Pulsator" (released in Russia in 2004). The second, "Aelita - The Queen Of Mars" (FeeLee Records, 2004), is a mystical soundtrack to Yakov Protazanov's eponymous silent film. The group represented Finland with it at the Moscow International Film Festival. CW, circulating through European avant-garde festivals in jet-setter mode, are among Moscow's most beloved guests. Cleaning Women have just as many fans in Russia as at home—including Tequilajazzz leader Evgeny Fedorov, who sang "Technigrad" on "Aelita - The Queen of Mars". Industrial clanging and howling, echoes of Lapland lullabies, Sufi mysticism and a smirk at technopop; Cleaning Women found the exit ramp from the Autobahn that Kraftwerk's music led them down—straight into a parallel world, the planet of cleaning robots, Cleanus. The wittiest dystopia, the most sinister dances, the most functional hair dryers!