Eugene Hutz

He is the front man for Gogol Bordello, a gypsy punk band fusing supercharged folk influences with a sideshow cabaret.
The character 'Eugene' in Petits suicides entre amis (2006) is based on him.
Father was a Russian butcher, and played guitar in the Ukraine rock band Meridian.
Family fled Ukraine after the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986. After being a refugee in Poland, Hungary, Austria and Italy the family emigrated to Vermont.
Dj'd a multicultural set of wild dance music for six years at the Bulgarian Bar in New York City's Lower East Side.

I'm in a fantastic place. I'm a free man in every part of my life, because I've had all these experiences with cultures, and they've fulfilled me in certain ways. I've also learned that whatever you gain, you gain inside. No external environment is going to bring you to a place of actual freedom. Freedom is not an external thing, it's an internal thing.
What we do is largely driven by artistic intuition, or intuition in general. It can be described as music from the heart. I'm not a fan of music that's overly calculated. Something happens in music as a form of art where it stops being music if it's not being connected with chaos, which is the primary state of the universe.
As an artist I'm pretty much free to take any culture and do whatever I like with it, without even thinking twice or looking back. That's the Gogo Bordello way. It's about free will, reinterpretation and collage. It's not important to me personally whether someone thinks our new songs are Balkan or more Latin. People are like, 'Wow, there's even some mariachi music there.' I'm like, 'Really? Oh, yeah, I guess I can see that it has a mariachi touch'. But I didn't really think about anything like that when I was creating the songs.

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