The word Maldoror can have many meanings – the protagonist of Comte de Lautreamont’s poem, the non-place of the “live” records by bands Nurse With Wound and Current 93, but also, the shop in Lopašićeva street whose goods satisfy the needs of rockers, metalheads, goths, and other similar urban tribes. However, its doors are open to everyone!
As an interesting fact, we are pointing out that the origin of the uncommon name of the shop goes all the way back to year 1868/69, when young Isidore-Lucien Ducasse, a French writer with Uruguayan ancestry, using the nom-de-plume Comte de Lautreamont, published the prose poem Maldoror (Les Chants de Maldoror), a superb romantic literary work later used by the original surrealists of the 1920s as one of their main wells of inspiration. The exotic name of the poem’s protagonist began wriggling through the pop culture of the 20th and the 21st century, and found its home in the British industrial and neofolk music scenes, whose exemplary bands such as Current 93 and Nurse With Wound both published Live at Bar Maldoror albums.
Music is how this name probably found its way to Zagreb, with its long tradition of listening to and producing darker types of rock music – dark, gothic, and industrial. Maldoror is a shop offering a lot to the lovers of that kind of sound and culture: records and CDs, shirts, flags, jewelry, fashion accessories and other trinkets, but will also excite any passer-by with its solid offer of local pop and rock music of the 80s and the 90s, hiding some true rarities. This shop today is an endemic example of local retail – there used to be several places of the same nature throughout the city, but today, all the “freaks” and those who feel like ones regularly visit Maldoror. As a curiosity, let’s also mention that the neofolk band Death in June held a small concert in Maldoror in 2011 for their most loyal fans.
