Enter the Sputnik – A Soviet Electronic Music Playlist

Like in literature, Russians can allow themselves a fastidious arrogance when their electronic music has to measure up with comparable art from the rest of the world. Take a band like Kraftwerk, the German pioneers of electronic music which have always drawn from Russian art and were never really popular in Russia. The Russian avant-garde of the 1920s and the Moscow Conceptualists of the 1970s inspired the covers of several Kraftwerk albums, and the group has used slogans and words written in the Cyrillic alphabet regularly during their performances. Yet, in the Cold War narrative it was almost exclusively them who were labeled pioneers in the field of electronic music, and Kraftwerk was perceived as a distinctively German band. Overall, Western audiences were being brainwashed that there certainly could be no funk and avantgarde behind the Iron Curtain, and therefore got robbed of close encounters with sublime artists like f.e. Eduard Artemyev, who did the scores for many of Andrei Tarkovsky‘s film masterpieces.

Now take a turn on the path of de-evolution, delete boring, modern electronic music from your mental hard disc and enter the Sputnik with me. Feel the excitement of your mission and become part of a world where you feel like a quantum particle, a rider through a post-apocalyptic world, or just a spaceonaut riding the original synth wave that daft punks and stranger thingsters clone so successfully. Experience the pleasures and hard-cutting disturbance of the real thing, a perfect blend of machine, melody, and experiment. Music nurtured by the vast and diverse folklore of the nations that were united under the hammer and sickle, all of which created a Soviet Kosmische Music.

by Saliha Enzenauer

N. Sokolov – Safari (1984)
Balboa’s gonna fly now, but first we’ll listen to Ivan Drago‘s dominatrix wife giving the “to the left- to the right” instructions that are heard on here. “Safari” is one of the awesome gymnastic exercise tunes compiled by the Soviet Health Ministry. The track has a strange euphoria about it: while listening, images of Olympic gold medals, cold glory, crushed capitalism, and red cosmonauts in space keep creeping up your conciousness.

Alfred Schnittke – Potok (Stream) 1969
Alfred Schnittke was a postmodernist Russian-German composer of serious, dark-toned musical works characterized by abrupt juxtapositions of radically different and often contradictory styles, an approach that came to be known as “polystylism.” Schnittke’s work wanders between life and death: in 1985, Schnittke suffered a stroke and was clinically dead for a short time. The event unleashed enormous creative powers, more than half of his most important works were created in the 13 years remaining, during which three more strokes in 1991 and 1994 repeatedly prevented him from working. After his fourth stroke, Schnittke was able to write a 9th Symphony before he died in 1998 at the age of 63. Potok (Stream), is Schnittke’s only electronic composition (1969)

Yuri Morozov– Human Extinction (1979)
Morozov was a genre-bending artist and underground hero who was active during the 70s and 80s. With his spiritual and historical themes, Morozov became a KGB target, the agency closely monitored his recording sessions and ransacked his apartment. Human Extinction is Morozov’s unreleased album of electronic and psychedelic experimentation with elements of Musique Concrète. A fantastic and fanciful soundtrack that reminds us of that the earthly demise of the human species doesn’t resemble the big bang of a doomsday, but is an ongoing process and cacophony. Think de-evolution, not atom bombs and apocalypse.

Eduard Artemyev – Metamorphoses (1980)
A pioneer of electronic music: Artemyev wrote his first composition in 1967, on one of the first synthesizers, the ANS synthesizer developed by Evgeny Murzin, a magical machine of which to this day only the one prototype exists. Artemyev is best known for his collaborations with Andrei Tarkovsky, for whom he did the scores of Solaris, Mirror, Stalker, and more. (Cosmic synchronicity: the moment I wrote down the word “Solaris”, it was mentioned in the film The Third Generation by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.)

Simo Lazarov- Ufo (1981)
The Stockhausen of Bulgaria. Simo Lazarov founded and directed the first Bulgarian Studio for Electronic Music at the Bulgarian National Radio (1973-99). He is one of the leading figures in the field of electronic and computer music in Bulgaria and created his own school of “Computer Composing”. In 1991 the Technical University in Sofia awarded Lazarov a Ph.D. degree for his thesis Composing and Performing Computer Music By Using Personal Computers. He taught at the State Academy of Music (1977-88), the Technical University (1983-99), the New Bulgarian University where he currently is lecturer in “Computer Systems and Technologies in Music”, and also at Sofia University where he was promoted Associate Professor in 1999. Concurrently, he taught at the summer courses organised by the University of Ann Arbor (USA) and at the summer courses of the Lansing University of Michigan (since 1998)- good to see him operate in the close peripheries of electronic city Detroit.

Electronic music should never have looked any different.

Stanislav Keitchi – ANSiana
Stanislav Keitchi is one of the veterans of the Russian electronic music movement. Working in the studio of Russian engineer Evgeny Murzin (who built the ANS synthesizer), Keitchi was one of the first musicians to use the legendary synthesizer. Keitchi created highly experimental music with bizarre sound scapes. Ansiana is a difficult listen and unlike anything you have ever heard. Some of the tracks fall into near-ambient territory with meditative undertones, others go into spacey minimal ambience and others sound like a crossover between electroacoustic and musique concrete. Finally, some songs are just too weird to describe. Stanislav used: the ANS synthesizer, keyboards, and the Ovaloid, a Russian acoustic instrument constructed by Viacheslav Kolleychouk.

Boris Petrov – Memory (1984)
Not much information can be found about this mysterious composer. Actually, I couldn’t find any information at all. Composed as “rock-ballet”, Memory is neither rock nor ballet, but weird and beautiful soviet wave balancing on the edge of kitsch.

Redkaya Ptica – Instrumental ( 1982)
Soviet Prog Space Disco with Pink Floyd riffs.

Tetris – Theme Song (1989)
Ouch! despite the Empire’s market domination and control via App-stores, the most successful and top-selling video game is not made in USA, but Russia. On top of it all, with the iconic Tetris theme song, a Russian traditional has been planted in countless heads all over the world. Korobeiniki is based on the 1861 poem by Nikolay Nekrasov. The lyrics describe a young peddler and a dark-eyed woman named Katja and their nightly quarrel over goods in a metaphor for courtship. The song quickly achieved the status of a Russian folk tune due to its catchy melody, steadily increasing pace and dance character. In 1989, Hirokazu Tanaka remade the song for the Nintendo Game Boy version of Tetris.