Russian Industrial Music
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Chapter One: Russian Proto-Industrial "Honor to the Futurists who forbade the painting of female hams, the painting of portraits and guitars in the moonlight. They made a huge step forward: they abandoned meat and glorified the machine." --Kasimir Malevich, 1918 In 1921, Russian physicist Lev Theremin, an inventor who insisted on building all his creations by hand, constructed the theremin, one of the 20 th century's first successful electronic musical instruments and still the only music instrument whose haunting tones are elicited without touching the device. Unlike Theremin, neither famous theremin-users John Cage, Download, Brian Eno, Meat Beat Manifesto or Edgar Varese were ever arrested for its use. After a decade of teaching and performing, Theremin was suddenly seized and imprisoned in 1938 by the KGB on the grounds of “anti-Soviet Propaganda.” Theremin was sent to Siberia and later to a labor camp in Omsk, where, alongside other indentured scientists, he was forced to work on various military projects (Theremin was later given the Stalin Prize for perfecting eavesdropping device “the bug”). So begins the history of industrial music in Russia. At around the time of the theremin's conception, diverse movements of the Russian avant-garde began to lay the groundwork for Russia's industrial tradition. In a backlash to society's fearful criticism of technological progress, the pre-Revolutionary movement of Russian Futurism embraced technology's symbols, glorifying in writing and art a surrealistic gyre of pollution, noise, speed and machines. Though categorically un-industrial in their progressive outlook, the Futurists definitely anticipated early industrial methods and aesthetics with their manifesto “Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” which called for the following artists' rights to be revered: “To feel an insurmountable hatred for the language existing before our time,” and “to enlarge the scope of the poet's vocabulary with arbitrary and derivative words.” The work concludes with the promise that “…if for the time being the filthy stigmas of Your ‘common sense' and ‘good taste' are still present in our lines, these same lines for the first time already glimmer with the Summer Lightening of the New Coming Beauty of the Self-sufficient Word” (D. Burliuk, Alexander Kruchenykh, V. Mayakovsky, Victor Khlebnikov). Music of this time also experienced a dose of experimentation, and included symphonies constructed entirely of factory whistles throughout the early 1920s. The Futurist opera “Victory Over the Sun,” complete with set designs based Malevich's “Black Square,” transformed the people on stage into “moving machines by costumes of cardboard and wire.” Meanwhile, a competing art movement called Constructivism focused on the strict practicalization of art by declaring “ Art is finished! It has no place in the human labor apparatus. Labor, technology, organization...that is the ideology of our time." In time, these ideals would be pushed to grotesque and amusing extremes by the original industrialists. At the beginning of the 1920s all modern art movements were officially sanctioned by the government as unsuitable for mass propaganda use. Visionaries of the Constructivist movement, in vogue at the time, were sent into exile. The government now endorsed only one type of art: Socialist Realism, a movement designed to glorify the efficacy of the Soviet Regime. Socialist Realism was famous for such gems as “Roses for Stalin,” which features beaming Russian children granting the dictator who killed an estimated 40 million of his own people a fresh bouquet. Beneath the veneer of this “artistic honesty by the demand of the masses,” there loomed a different world. In the words of Dmitry Vasilyev, editor of Russia's Independent Electronic Music Zine, “The Western world is well-familiar with Russian avant-garde, constructivism and futurism from the beginning of the century, but not everybody understands that while in the West art was always considered the property of the individual, that in Russia the propogandistic slogan 'art belongs to the people' was merely a trading coin in the political (ore precisely, ideological) games of its rulers. How else can the fact be explained that all the most important innovations in the area of synthesized sound (the technological base of industrial music) in Russia occurred in secret military research laboratories? And that nothing about them is known to this day not only in the West, but in Russia?” Indeed, the first of these inventions, a two-voiced analog music synthesizer known as EKVODIN, was conceived in the 1930s at a Russian center called TSNIATRI, or “Automatic Devices for Defense.” Its inventor, Andrei Volodin, was not a musician at all; his task had been to conduct military research in the area of psychoacoustics. In his research, Volodin needed a source of material for his experiments with human response to various sounds, and so the EKVODIN was born. Soon the device found use at the hands of musicians, and Volodin's synthesizer almost went into mass production but, uninterested in electronic music, the Soviet State cut funding for his project in the sixties. After that, Volodin continued working on the synthesizer, but he simply did not have the energy or resources to go on - Volodin died right in his laboratory in 1982. More success was enjoyed by the ANS – the first photoelectric synthesizer invented anywhere in the world. Designed in 1939 by Evgeney Murzin, th e technological basis of the invention lay in the synthesis of sound from an artificially drawn sound wave. Murzin was an engineer and the design of the ANS was a hobby that took 20 years to realize. Despite the fact that only one copy of the ANS was ever created, it enjoyed wide use by many Russian composers. Eerie ANS compositions by Edward Artimiev grace Tarkovsky's sci-fi films Stalker and Solaris. In 1999, Russia's Electroshock records released a compilation drawn from archive tapes of ANS works from 1964 - 1971. Composers on this album included Edward Artemiev, Stanislav Keitchi, and, most notably, Alfred Schnittke, whose steel-grinding-against-steel ambient-noise composition “Steam”marks the beginning of a distinctly industrial sound in Russia. On to Part 2!Nadya Lev |