Originally, I was going to do a bit on Red Army Choir covers of certain pop songs but figured that a commentary on something a little more on-brand with my eccentricity would interest the sophisticated reader out there amongst the masses. So, we will talk about weird electronic music!
Some of the earliest Electronic songs sound like evil demon beats to torment and mortify souls to, an example is some of the early works by pioneer of the genre Vladimir Ussachevsky, who was kinda Russian (on his father’s side)? He emigrated to America eventually. In 1956 he played around with electronic recording stuff and cobbled this work together, which I think sounds like a possessed voicemail recorder.
I think you could argue that something akin to electronic music also emerged out of the vague sphere of Russian collective unconsciousness, the 1922 piece titled “Symphony of Industrial Horns” also was an experimental piece which tried to utilize all the fancy gadgets of the time period to produce some nice music. It also ended up sounding kinda evil and creepy, a sort of alternative timeline version of the Internationale wherein Lenin was a Terminator bent on exterminating all human life (and capitalism).
https://youtu.be/3v3u2sU54Os?t=331
The piece was originally written by Arseny Avraamov back in 1922 as stated before, the live performance used everything from canons to machine guns to sirens and heavy industrial equipment. You could argue it was trying to sound inspiring and stoke the flames of industrialist pride, but to modern ears I think it just sounds like Terminator Communismcore. Mind you we only have reconstructions and re-performances of it so maybe they’re just performing it wrong making it sound creepy. Who knows!
Next, we’ll talk about is something less spooky sounding, works by Eduard Artemyev! He is a relatively well-known composer of electronic music who has done stuff on shows like Siberiade or the film Stalker. Most of his works were produced between the late 70s and throughout the 80s. I’d say with reasonable confidence he’s probably one of the more well-known Russian-ey electronic music composers outside of Russia.
(Pretend like you recognize it for extra cool points!)
If you really wanted to you could find albums of his miscellaneous works on YouTube with relative ease. Here’s one from the 80s.
On one last little bonus stop in our journey, we’ll go waaay back in time again, to 1932 to listen to surprise surprise, more weird electronic music! This last piece is a rendition of a classical piece performed on Nikolai Voinov’s “Variophone”. It was a kind of primitive synthesizer which operated via cut-cardboard disks. Check it out!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIR3pCgqb5o
I think maybe the moral or theme of today’s post is that early electronic music sounded really creepy. Oh!
Also, hopefully it expands people’s awareness as to just how old a lot of musical genres are, at least in incipient forms. I think a lot of people think music like this, or utilizing technology heavily in music, was more of a 70s and 80s onward thing, which is kinda true, but it was also evidently something experimented with well into the 20s and 30s. Each of the figures mentioned here should serve as interesting points of “jumping off” into weird musical rabbit-holes, so if anyone explores further and finds some weird early Russian Synth/Electronic music feel free to post in the comments!