You probably won’t be surprised to hear about my enthusiasm for brutalism as well.
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but in general the roots of all this architecture go back to the times of the revolution and at that time it was like an attempt to turn the page of history. I highly recommend getting acquainted with the Soviet avant-garde.
I think the best quality of a person is curiosity, it is like an engine of progress. And it is very cool when history is a source of inspiration, and not a reason for regret.
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It’s Дафт Пунк !
Are they called “arsenal”, is that right?
its pizdetz and my traumatized psyche
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I highly recommend this documentary. It is mostly about Tsarist Russia but very interesting and in many ways also sheds light on how all this influenced Russian art in general. This film is about the first Russian photographer (Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky) who used the autochrome method and took color photographs and shows Russia very deeply. The film was only possible because the photo archive was bought by the USA and was found in the archive of the Library of Congress.
Luckily there are English subtitles here =)
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1 hour and a bit by bike.
I used to live in Bristol. Did the bike path run quite a few times.
Was also involved with organising a skate event to raise money for cherridee, Macmillan Nurses. Skate from Bath to Bristol. Takes ages. To be honest I hated it, made me want to burn all my skateboards. But some people love that stuff.
Nuffin against cherridee work at all, nor Macmillan Nurses, but Long distance skateboarding, no thanks.
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Poultry farm anthem (1956)
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ANS 1971
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Take my money
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Some of the wording here seem to suggest that innovation is only done in western-europe/US, and everybody else does only deformed versions of it.
When Arnold Schoenberg wrote the first piece without a key in 1910, Scriabin did it in 1912, and both pieces have nothing to do with each other and sounding completely different.
There’s an almost forgotten Avantgarde of composers who grew from Scriabin, like Nikolai Obukhov, Yefim Golyshev, Alexander Mosolov and others. Each of them individuals!
So that’s already a wealth of unique ideas (and 120 years later a treasure to explore - if it weren’t so hard to get ahold of) before the Soviet era even started.
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there is, for example, the completely unrecognized Galina Ustvolskaya, who wrote her symphonies all her life and was practically never performed. I consider it a great tragedy. And the ugliness of the totalitarian system
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Now we know who the musical genius really is in that family.
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Yeah. European music history isn’t what I know best—but I suspect there are even old cultural traditions underlying Russian music that are somewhat different than Austrian/German and French musics.
So pre-Soviet Russian and Soviet composers have their own aesthetics about what kind of dissonance sounds good, what scales work, etc…
A western European composer would never have written LE SACRE DU PRINTEMPS, at least not the way Stravinsky wrote it.
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There’s not many things in life like that eh?
You must be a pretty stoked Dad.
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I am not sure if anyone has posted this but, this film came up in a random old episode of sonic state I listening to yesterday and I thought of this thread
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Little ficker keeps pushing me out of the way while I’m trying to fix it.
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I ran into these in Nara, last week:
The Spring and Autumn period was roughly contemporary to Classsical Greece.
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I would sincerely hope that’s not what people end up taking from this thread.
The Soviet Union was a massive and complex place and we’d do all of its people a disservice by only focusing on a few areas of cultural overlap in the 1980’s. I’m not much when it comes to the history of Russian/Soviet music (although Funeral Rave by Little Big is full of bangers), so I’m happy to be schooled where that’s concerned.
I mean, if you want to talk innovation, we’re talking about the system that created the Soyuz capsule, still going strong after almost 60 years service. It must be a source of constant annoyance to non-westerners that the only part of the space race the West talks about was getting a man on the moon (at the time an almost completely pointless endeavour). I’m much more interested in the Venera missions and Mir than a couple of geezers putting a flag up on the moon.
It’s always kind of annoyed me that people seem to think the Polivoks was some sort of Minimoog clone. As far as subtractive synths go, they’re pretty different, the Polivoks being probably the most famous example of the triumph over scarcity endemic in Soviet manufacturing at the time, but that doesn’t take away from the sheer genius of its design, both in aesthetic and technical terms.
Synths like the Alisa 1377 and the Aelita were absolute powerhouses of synth design. Brutal, but versatile and very much their own thing, despite what half the internet would have you believe. The Alisa being specifically designed with experimental music at the centre, a trend continued in the former Soviet states through Soma, Erica Synths, Elta Music and others. Right from the theremin, former Soviet states have made instruments with experimental and more esoteric musical approaches at the forefront of their design. It would be easy to write a lot of this stuff off as accidental or circumstantial, but it’s such a clear line of approach that you just can’t.
Sure, the Soviet Union made its fair share of Roland and Moog clones in the 80’s, but look at the synth world globally since then and maybe they were just ahead of the curve…
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