Russian Industrial Music
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Chapter Two “Industrial culture was about exploring the conditions of expression under ultimate control. Could meat be animated by the inanimate (metal; witness Mark Pauline)? Could the apparent limitations of machinery be pushed beyond by spirit (e.g., human ingenuity)? Could metallic-sponsored shock bring us to new insights on the human condition? New stimulations? New, previously perverse, pleasures? The answers to these questions were always implicitly affirmative. It was as if pent up creative energy. . . was allowed release, not through pure expression, but through massive control. Emblems of that kind of power which limits--metal and steel--imprisoned the artistic impulse, only to find it seeping out in screeches. As any neurotic will tell you, complete control only results in its absolute loss.” - Joshua Gunn, Lectro-Slue: Generic Origins If the early industrialists in the West were fetishizing the experience of expression under control, people creating a similar sound in the USSR were living it. Separated from their counterparts by the iron curtain, musicians in Russia began composing, collaging, cutting up and programming a range of sound experiments which became the first industrial projects in the USSR at a time when such activity was prohibited by the government. Bizarrely, many of these works coincided directly with the releases of groups such as Throbbing Gristle, Z'ev, NON and Cabaret Voltaire, completely unknown in Russia at the time. This suggested that the zeitgeist of industrial culture transmitted through all boundaries of communication. This section focuses on the most influential Russian industrialists who produced under the Soviet regime. They are ZGA, Nochnoi Prospekt, and Linija Mass. One small crowded apartment gave rise to ZGA, one of Russia's original noise projects. Searching for creative ways to perform loud music without disturbing the neighbors, Nick Soudnnick, the founding member of ZGA, began creating his own instruments, called Zgamoniums, by attaching contact microphones to metal sheets, plates of steel, iron grids, springs, and other found objects and metallic scraps. The recorded reverberations allowed him to create powerful music without performing it at a loud volume. Producing sounds by stroking contact-miked metal sheets with whips or hammering the springs with mallets, among other techniques, Soudnick was able to achieve sustained, low-frequency resonances that were picked up by the contact mikes. The microphones used by ZGA were never designed for musical purposes, but were used in Russia as a signaling devices that sent a single electrical impulse whenever, for instance, the glass to which the mikes were attached was broken [1]. Acting as an unusual pickup for instruments, several of these mikes were attached to the body of the instrument at different portions to pick up different resonances. The sound of the resulting improv noise, described by Finnish industrial musician Anton Nikkilä, functions as “a metaphor of the late Soviet or post-Soviet everyday life: rusty, broken-down, unpleasantly dominated by cold metal, functioning to seemingly impenetrable, absurd logic.” [2] Jumping back to early Soviet life is another influential industrial group, Linija Mass (“Line of the Masses”). The brainchild of artist Alexander Lebedev-Frontov, Linija Mass' releases Prolekult and The Iron Revolution (with titles such as “ Total Mobilization” and “Lenin on the Labour Discipline”) combine the sounds of military marches, revolutionary speeches, and the atrocious machinery noise. Unlike ZGA, which clearly exposed the construction behind its zgamoniums, Linija Mass remained secretive about its workings, harboring “a negative attitude towards information about our releases, because it is always a reduction." [2] It is known that Lebedev-Frontov began creating music in the late seventies at age 19, when he began constructing sound collages by recording the machine tools at his workplace, a factory called “Red October” outside of St. Petersburg. But Lebedev-Frontov's first industrial music experience occurred five years prior to that, when he was 13. Influenced by the Beatlemania of his friends, a young Lebedev-Frontov purchased a cheap copy of a Beatles album in St. Petersburg. The album was in a bootleg format referred to in St. Petersburg as “record on the bones,” a home-produced record etched onto X-ray film. When Lebedev-Frontov fired up the record player, he was greeted by a robust male voice confirming his desire to listen to the Beatles and delivering subsequently a string of profanities. Then, instead of the sounds of the Liverpool quartet, Lebedev-Fontov was assaulted by two minutes of membrane-tearing radiostatic crashes and terrible howls. Lebdev-Frontov describes this experience as a musical death and rebirth [3], forever steering him away from melodious compositions and propelling him towards harsh improvisational brutality. In sharp contrast to the experimental percussion of ZGA and the mobilized drones of Linija Mass stood Notchnoi Prospect (“Night Avene”), a rhythmical, ambient-vocal band of the mid-80s. A collaboration between Alexei Borisov, Ivan Sokolov and Natasha Borzhomov, Notchnoi Prospekt began as a “techno-pop” band but soon progressed in the vein of traditional industrial a la TG [4] . Like its lineup, the musical focus of Notchnoi Prospekt constantly changed, rotating through stages of guitar-industrial, electronic dance music, a host of popular styles including bluegrass and rockabilly, noise, ambient and musique concrete. Its most significant albums, “Novoi Fisiki” (New Physicists), “Demoktratiya i Disciplina,” (Democracy & Discipline), Asbestos and “Kisolty” (Acids), reached cult status in Russia, and during the bloom of perestroika during the second half of the eighties, Notchnoi Prospekt was able to play to large crowds across Russia. The lyrics of Notchnoi Prospekt, as described by Borisov's musical collaborator Anton Nikila, delineate mundane events in extreme detail “ while somewhere in the background looms an apocalyptic vision such as an environmental catastrophy or mindless, totalitarian masses taking onto streets,” sung of sometimes monotonously, sometimes highly melodically, sometimes in Russian, sometimes in English, and sometimes with “Danish-football-reporter-played-backwards-on-half-speed-sounding diatribes” tossed in for good measure [2]. Alexei Borisov still produces music today, moving into the realm of IDM and minimal-techno with his project F.R.U.I.T.S. While Z'ev was creating kinetic sculptures of metal and using them as musical instruments, Nicholas Soudnick began constructing zgamoniums in his Riga apartment in the USSR. While Throbbing and Cabaret Voltaire began their experiments in England, Linija Mass, Notchnoi Prospekt and others began creating similar sounds in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Transmission of such ideas through the iron curtain was virtually impossible – indeed, all of these musicians have all admitted in interviews that they did not become familiar with the ideas of the Western industrialists until the late 80s. As Genesis P-Orridge put it, referring to his European and American counterparts: “all of us were working before it became ‘industrial,' and discovered each other and recognized that same kindred spirit, that same driving force, that made all of us… ‘industrial.'” However, P-Orridge remarked in the same 1983 interview that felt industrial was not strong enough to be a culture, because he didn't think that what he and others like him did had a reverberation right around the world and back [5]. He may have been wrong. Score one for the Psychic Youth. Nadya Lev
[2] Nikkilä, Anton. “ Reviews: Russian industrial noise: Pioneers, youth league and party members.” The Wire Magazine, Nov. 01. Original, unabridged version available on Tamizdat: [http://www.tamizdat.org] [3] Kobech, Anton. “Linija Mass.” Interview with Alexander Lebedev-Frontov. October 10, 2001. In Russian. Available at: http://www.industrialmusic.ru/docs/music/interviews/_/articles-20.htm [4] Tolmatsky, Dmitry. “Industrial Music in Russia: A Short Review.” Part of the Industrial Culture Extended FAQ, available in Russian at http://rwcdax.here.ru/indrus.htm . This section available in English at http://rwcdax.here.ru/DIST/eng/history.htm . [5] Vale, V., Juno, Andrea. Interview with Throbbing Gristle . Re/Search #6/7: Industrial Culture Handbook (Re/Search, 1983.) |