After Reading the book Back in The USSR I found that the Soviet Government was incredibly hostile towards Rock music. However, is it possible for something resembling Modern Electronic music be invented in the USSR and be approved by the government?
AHC: Electronic/ Dubstep invented in the USSR?
- Thread starter Mister Abbadon
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Considering how fiercely disapproving of "western decadence" Soviet culture was offically - I doubt electronica or dubstep as a dance culture would be an approved format.
You could have some "easy listening" electronica officially produced that DJ's would remix and spin at different speeds and such but that's just my mad vision.
Samisdata would go nuts making records and an underground network of clubs would probably spring up. YMMDV from what I've got.
You could have some "easy listening" electronica officially produced that DJ's would remix and spin at different speeds and such but that's just my mad vision.
Samisdata would go nuts making records and an underground network of clubs would probably spring up. YMMDV from what I've got.
I understand that the topic is dead already as three years, but since there are only two posts here, and since I know the situation better, I consider it my duty to speak on this topic.
Firstly, the situation with Rock Music. Despite the most "loud words", the reason for these persecutions is the simplest - pop performers have set the authorities on competitors. How did this happen? It can not be said that they basically discussed the interests of the CPSU (most of them are lyricized as lent), but they often performed at official concerts, they were written by professional composers ... In short, they all had connections in the highest circles.
An important point is that ... that Russians have a different idea of rock than in the west. Let's take an example such as "Vocal-Intrumental Ensembles". What it is? Simply put it's a musical band. These bands were oriented to young people, and played the appropriate music - for example, Funk, Disco, Free Jazz ... Electronic Rock and even Hard Rock. Nevertheless, in Russia not one of these ensembles is considered to be a Rock Band. Why? Because of the playful fun, abstract lyrics, patronage from above ... For a Russian rocker - rock is an alternative, oppositional, with its own special worldview. This is due to the fact that the blow was given to independent groups. Music of Victor Tsoi is a typical "new wave", but he is a Rocker with a capital R, and for example the "Funny Guys" ensemble is a devil's pop. If the Russian rocker hears the words "Pop Rock" or "Pop Punk", then He will happen a cognitive dissonance.
Secondly, the fate of electronics in the USSR was not so dramatic. It was in the USSR that Lev Termen created the termwox, he is also an etterophone - a tool on which they play, making "magic" passes in the air. In the late 50's and early 60's, the Ensemble of musical instruments by Vyacheslav Valerianovich Meshcherin became famous. His music was what the hour called Space Age Pop. Light, cheerful, slightly mocking melodies were the soundtrack to a beautiful future, the features of which seemed to begin to show through in the stable present. In 1967 the Moscow experimental studio of electronic music was founded. From it came the famous musician Eduard Artemiev. Long before Bryan Ino came up with the label "ambient", music in this genre was in full swing in Soviet films, for which the soundtracks Artemiev wrote. Among these paintings were a lot of fiction - "Stalker" and "Solaris" by Andrei Tarkovsky, and also "Moon Rainbow", "Return from the orbit", "Dream towards", "Invisible Man" and witty propaganda animated series "Baba Yaga against!" .
The Baltic scene was actively developing. Each republic had its own "electronic hero". In Estonia - Sven Grunberg, the author of music for the films "Hotel" The Dead Alpinist "and" The Curse of the Valley of Serpents ". In Lithuania - VIA "Argo" under the leadership of Giedrius Kupryavichus. In Latvia - "Opus" Sigmar Liepinsha, and also stars of the first magnitude - group "Zodiac" under control of Janis Lucens. This ensemble, which focused on such Western samples as the music of Space, Kraftwerk and Jean-Michel Jarre, created electronics with a bias in disco, then in light rock. The science-fiction theme of the Latvians at first did not stick out as much as Space, but on the second album "Music in the Universe" they directly declared themselves as a "space" group. Participants of the "Zodiac" even invited to the Star City, where they were able to communicate with astronauts and rocket designers. Yes, the musicians were given a trip to the closed city to classified specialists, just to make them better imbued with the romance of the cosmos. Can you imagine such now? "Zodiac" during the "Soviet occupation" published the records in millions of copies. With Latvia gaining independence, the star group ... immediately disintegrated. In the 80's electronic music became commonplace. Some groups were inspired by the "computer" sound. It seemed that with the advent of perestroika, freedom of creativity and private entrepreneurship, electronics, along with the rest of the music, had to blossom. But it turned out differently. From censorship harmless electronic music has never suffered much, but a big role here was played by money to buy expensive equipment. And "freedom" came just in place of state support, which was difficult to replace naked enthusiasm.
So if you just want to move the Soviet Union in the first half of the 80's, then I reiterate - nothing will happen with the dubstep!
Should make a new thread before this is locked so we can discuss cool Soviet/Eastern bloc electronic music.
Let's create a theme, and I'll drop "samples" there - I just have a lot of topics devoted to Soviet culture.
PS - by the way, an integral part of nostalgia for the USSR is the so-called "Soviet Wave". This term refers to groups that perform electronic music on Soviet subjects. Sometimes the experience of Soviet musicians is used, sometimes dream-pop.
I've just listened to a lot of Soviet/Eastern Bloc electronic music. Artemiev was indeed a great musician, and it does seem interesting to have Eastern Bloc electronic music spawn something more. To me, the Eastern Bloc had some great "equivalents" of Jean-Michel Jarre (or other European electronic music--especially (West) German--like all of which came out of Germany in the 70s) like Miha Kralj of Yugoslavia and Reinhard Lakomy of the DDR.
Unfortunately, I know much less about the electronics of the other CMEA and the Warsaw Pact members. And how similar they are?
Perhaps it is better to create a theme for me - since you know more.
I don't necessarily know more, I just know a bit about the circumstances the musicians in question recorded in and of course have listened to some of their recorded output. I love that 70s electronic sound (generally called progressive electronic) personified by Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, etc. and I have found it interesting to have found musicians behind the "Iron Curtain" who recorded similar music of similar quality.
There are several Soviet-developed synthesizers comparable to what was developed in the West in the 1970s. I don't know too much about them other than that yes, the Soviet Union had something which could be considered competition to popular Western synthesizers.
Suppose Stalin decides that classical music is bourgeois and counterrevolutionary. Composers are to immediately come up with a brand new electronic style, reflecting the future that is World Socialism.
Lev Thermin gets rehabilitated and gets to spends his time working on theremins and effects pedals.
Lev Thermin gets rehabilitated and gets to spends his time working on theremins and effects pedals.
But the Soviets found plenty of opportunity to incorporate Socialist Realism into classical music. Electronic music is just too strange before the 1960s thanks to technology. And what would these early electronic musicians create? Musique concrète? Stockhausen-esque electronic? I could see something like that being made into a government-sponsered art form, but it would need to either independently evolve the developments in Western electronic music (like a Soviet Terry Riley) or otherwise wouldn't not be very big (intriguing as that sound is, it has limited appeal). The Eastern Bloc loved Beatles knockoffs. Even if you butterflied the Beatles, you'd still have some huge Western rock band the youth would be obsessing over. They were also obsessing over rock music in general, evidenced by all those interesting progressive rock inspired albums from Eastern Bloc nations in the late 70s/early 80s. Prog rock is a kin genre to 70s electronic, so I think the best case to lead to Soviet dance music becoming huge is to have this genre accelerate during the 1980s and become increasingly played and increasingly Western influenced. There are black metal/death metal albums recorded in the Soviet Union which are as intense as anything from Sweden, Germany, etc. So let's have our Soviets be increasingly influenced by Western electronic trends, even if they're late to the show, since they can easily seek out such Western things like Soviet extreme metallers could for their respective genre. More techno and house influence, perhaps.
At some point, the long history of Russian electronic music begins to mount up with these newfound influences, and you have some electronic genres which are very cutting edge and become huge in not only Russia, but also the entire former Eastern Bloc, and before long, the West. Something about Soviet electronic producers tends toward creativity and captures the attention of most of Europe and even beyond to America.
By 2010, you'll have three decades of solid, influential, and important Soviet and Eastern Bloc electronic music.
In a surviving Soviet Union, with censorship equivalent to modern PR China, I think you'd also see some interesting EDM emerge which isn't quite like you'd expect and would have some unique traits. Really, I think a discussion should be focused on a USSR which evolves in that directions.
Eastern Bloc musicians were great at copying Western trends and in many cases improving on them. One look at Eastern Bloc progressive rock shows the ingenuity of those musicians. If you have Eastern Bloc electronic musicians grab a hold of early dubstep, they could produce their own take on the sound.
Dubstep emerged after the soviet union fell... and it was heavily anti establishment... something the soviet union wouldve seen as a threat.
Soviet electronica wasnt conductive to copying urban british electronica due to differing styles and cultures of production.
And people really beed to stop mentioning progressive rock because its the furthest thing from dubstep and it comes off as an attempt to gentrify the genre.
But you can make a regime-friendly anything. Western-style music in modern PR China is a fine example of how censorship (prevelent as it is) needn't impede musical creativity.
Maybe dubstep is a bad example (it does have specific origins, even if you can easily copy it with no link to said origins), although Eastern Bloc electronic could easily produce something as mainstream in not only Eastern Europe but all of Europe and beyond. I think the AHC is met by having a popular sort of EDM originate from the USSR or maybe the Eastern Bloc as a whole.
I mention prog rock because it was produced by Eastern Bloc musicians, often featured a heavy electronic component, and is linked to more electronic genres. In the West, certainly Tangerine Dream's influence carried into modern popular EDM in some form.
Even if there was an establishment friendly electronic style developed in the ussr it would be outpatched/outproduced by western genres very quickly.
The evolution of electronic music depended on the development of better computers, hardware, production standards, and group skill as well as having a culture base.
Also a lot of modern electronic music production was inspired by auditory hallucinations/distortions caused by drugs.
In order for the ussr to be the forefront of electronic music they would have to be at the forefront of computer technology and have a thriving drug scene at the same time........both of which are improbably individualy and asb combined.
The evolution of electronic music depended on the development of better computers, hardware, production standards, and group skill as well as having a culture base.
Also a lot of modern electronic music production was inspired by auditory hallucinations/distortions caused by drugs.
In order for the ussr to be the forefront of electronic music they would have to be at the forefront of computer technology and have a thriving drug scene at the same time........both of which are improbably individualy and asb combined.
ASB - Sometimes Stalin's repressions mean simply - "Sorry, but we do not have the money to finance your quirks." Not only in the USSR, but throughout the world (in fact, the gap between the opposition of Western and Soviet culture can only be spoken from the 1950s (and this is not entirely true), in the 1920s and 1930s the culture of the United States, the USSR, and even Nazi Germany developed in a similar direction) electronic music - a very few understandable form of the avant-garde. And given that the first wave of urbanization has begun (that is, the urban population has been raised at the expense of the rural population), it becomes clear that there are no broad strata of the population capable of perceiving this music. But for the growing urban population, traditional instrumental music was of great interest. 30-ies in the Soviet musical history - a period of rapid development of variety music. In those years, the Jazz genre was especially popular - the genre was promoted by the pioneer of the Soviet stage Leonid Utyosov.
As a Russian semi-Headbanger I declare - the Russian metal scene is one of the weakest scenes in Europe. Of particular interest is folk-metal, but here Russian groups are mostly not sparkling. In Poland, like a good metal scene ... The problem is that in the Soviet era, metal was not very liked.
As for computers - in the 60s the USSR was one of the powers of the leaders in the field of information technology. And if the Soviet government makes an emphasis on OGAS, it can contribute to the collateral development of many areas of computer technology.
In the Soviet Union came up with ambient, so with electronics everything will be fine. As for LSD, I'm sure that to create music, do not necessarily use any rubbish.