Seeing Lenin i Shumov live is a bristling, tense experience '“ all taut rhythms, unscheduled left turns and oddly pleasing dischord vibrating your ribcage as if your skeleton was being paged by the Devil. Add to that the deceptively slight figure of Lenin mastermind Eugene (properly Evgenyi, I think) Slominerov front and centre with guitar, a living angular measurement frantically speaking in (Slavic) tongues, and slowly your double takes transform into happy hip-shakes. Really. No, really.

Who knows, then, what lurks in the heart of Eugene? Well, bassist Nick Taylor, who has some attitude, might. With any luck, so does Eugene his own bad self, who is supposed to be the one answering Andrew Lloyd Moseby's questions anyway. Embrace, therefore, the confusion, conflict and contradiction that in turn seem to bear-hug the Lenins' music.

The Lenins play all the time, all over the freaking place. Methinks you have quite a following, yes? Are we ever going to get a recording of you in this lineup? The people need to know. Nick Taylor: The band needs to know! It's possible. Anything's possible. Live in hope. Eugene Slominerov: I think our following until recently were the people who live next door, but then one of them joined the band, some moved out and some stopped talking to me because I stole their kosher cocoa beans. We also have one fan in New York and two in Finland. As for the recording, we are working on something humongous very slowly. I'm not promising anything, except maybe a single, maybe very soon, maybe on Blocks. Or not.

Are you stealing my kosher cocoa beans? ES: I am stealing everyone's beans and donating them to my friend Brian, who has a project called Slobbering Anus, out on Blocks November 25th.

Are you an angry man? Neurotic? Paranoid? The music, and certainly Eugene's persona, as my brain remembers it only fleetingly and viscerally from shows, seem to carry these emotional weights, but I'd feel like a wang if I assumed... ES: I wish the impression I gave off was that of a very, very good-looking stupid man. The music versus persona is what this band is all about. The emotional weights are never heavier than the weight of everyone in the band put together. I weigh less than everyone. This makes me very, very angry.

As most, if not all of the lyrics are in Russian, your non- or poorly- Russian-speaking audience here in the good old Canad of A is kinda forced to respond to Lenin i Shumov in terms of pure sound '” that is, without verbal cues they can understand. Does your awareness of this inform the music or the performance, or indeed, the lyrics themselves? Should we ign'ant Anglos know what you're saying? Do we deserve to? Do your ign'ant Anglo bandmates know what you're saying? Does it matter at all? ES: The awareness that my audience 'œdoesn't get it'? lets me write more freely. I experiment with the Russian language in a very goofy, quasi-deconstructionist style that I would be too afraid to write in for an audience that does 'œget it.'? My bandmates know what some of the songs are about '” what's more important is that almost a year later they learned the song titles. But I'm not hiding anything, just come on over... we'll talk about what really matters... NT: I know some of the lyrics. Sometimes they're quite good '” like the one about the man who doesn't want to be an Empress, but rather wants to be the horse that throws the Empress from his back.

If I understood Russian, would I be floored by the evocative and sparkling wordplay, or are you singing song after song after song about the kosher cocoa beans you stole from me? ES: I hate everything I do. So maybe you should ask my friend Misha, his number is 905-763... (whoa there, I guess we shouldn't print that '“ ALM). Seriously, call him right now. NT: See above, you wang.

Last words, you maniacs? NT: Put the gun down, Andy. It's not worth it. ES: When I was young, I read a lot. Now I don't read as much. But I now read better books than those that I read when I was young. Such is life, I guess...