Demolition Group

Demolition Group is a Slovenian alternative rock band, formed in 1985 out of the pop group Gastrbajtrs (also written Gast'r'bajtrs). Its founders include the singer and lyricist Goran Šalamon, still the band's frontman, and Matjaž Pegam, who today looks after sound and production. The Culture.si portal calls them the noisiest and hardest-working funk band in Slovenia in the 1980s and 1990s: funk guitars, electronic and acoustic drums, a nervous saxophone and Šalamon's unmistakable voice.

Their first releases were cassettes on Opus Manuum in 1986, among them Mizerika, which the Italian label Cruisin' Hiara put out again on vinyl in 1987, followed by the Miracle EP in 1989. With Cruisin' Hiara they toured Central Europe and Yugoslavia, and they played the Druga godba festival in 1986, the Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean in Barcelona in 1987, San Remo Rock in 1988 and the Berlin Independence Days in 1989, at a time when only Laibach and Borghesia from Slovenia had a similar reach.

In 1993 KifKif released Bad Gag 2 and the mini CD Plays Gastrbajtrs. The band then worked closely with the theatre: they wrote the music for Roberto Zucco (1994), directed by Matjaž Pograjc at the Mladinsko Theatre, and for Butterendfly (1995). Their theatre music went onto Deep True Love (1995), voted record of the year in Slovenia, and Demolition Group was named band of the year 1995.

Neovangelij and Bič, luč in upanje (2001) followed on Dallas. The band also wrote the music for the film Temni angeli usode by Sašo Podgoršek, from a script by Goran Šalamon, and played the leading roles in it, and later scored Podgoršek's Sladke sanje.

After a long pause came Planet starcev (2011), launched at Kino Šiška in Ljubljana, the live album Na živo (2012), Zlagano sonce (2015), counted by critics among the best albums of its year, and Pojdiva tja (2018), nine songs in just over thirty minutes that closed a trilogy and mixed jazz and punk. The 2018 line-up was Šalamon, Pegam, Aleš Suša on saxophone and synth, Petar Stojanović on guitar and the brothers Tomi and Ivica Gregel on bass and drums.