This is a fragment from the LP “Popular Mechanics – Insect Culture”, recorded in Leningrad in 1985, released by Colin Fallows and Pete Fulwell of “Ark Records” (Liverpool) in 1987, and re-released in Moscow by SoLyd records in 1998 on cassette and CD with a bonus track and a text by Alexander Kan.

2.

The fragment is a humorous comment on the musical instrument allegedly representing “the soul of Russia” – the balalaika. The balalaika is a rather simple folk instrument, and musicians display their mastery by playing it very fast. Here the melody is speeded up absurdly, like a badly wound up machine, as if giving proof of the players’ unlimited dexterity.

3.

The reaction of music critics to Insect Culture was quite enthusiastic. One critic stated, "At various points, I thought my roof was leaking, my walls were shaking, my plumbing bursting and that next door neighbours were involved in some noisy, unshapely coupling involving ktichen utensils and lawn-mowers."

“satirical, humorous, eclectic, dense, chaotic, cryptic“. Quite obviously, the West had not expected such a production to come from the “wild” East, and in my paper, I will speak about the specific satire or “stiob” and humour we find in “Insect Culture”.

4.

More exactly, I will try to explain why it is important to distinguish, with respect to art, between stiob and humour as two steps in a dialectical process, as antíthesis and synthesis.

In fact, I consider humour to constitute a higher form of artistic expression than stiob, although stiob may enjoy more popularity, at least in academic circles, because analysing a specific stiob is particularly rewarding when looking at an artist’s strategy of questioning social conditions. What is more, such strategies are today frequently mistaken for art itself. I will return to this question at the end of my lecture.

5.

Insect Culture musicians were Sergey Kuryokhin on synthesizer, Igor Butman on saxophone and New Composers Valery Alakhov and Igor Verichev with music and sound collages. The New Composers created the fragment we just listened to.

6.

Kuryokhin had gained a reputation in the West as a brilliant piano-player and as the “enfant terrible” of the Soviet music underground.

7.

Butman was only 24 years old, but he was already celebrated as a jazz virtuoso. Kuryokhin had played with him since the early 1980s.

Like the previous picture from 1981, this picture is also by German clarinettist and journalist Hans Kumpf. He took it in August 1983 during a jam session at the Leningrad Literary Club 81 with Kuryokhin and other musicians and performers. The young man playing the guitar is Boris Grebenshikov, the leader of the band “Aquarium”, and one of the fathers of Russian rock music. “Tibetan Tango”, a song Kuryokhin had written for Aquarium in 1983, found its way into “Insect Culture”.

8.

As a matter of fact, in the 1980s, the collaboration between musicians of different music styles – avant-garde, jazz, pop and rock – was common among young Leningrad musicians and a cornerstone of Kuryokhin’s Pop Mekhanika life performances. Here is an example from 1986.

9.

Alakhov and Verichev, on the other hand, were pioneers in sampling. Their approach was technically and artistically sophisticated and ínnovative in the way it used Russian speech fragments. This is why Kuryokhin invited them to join his project “Insect Culture“. It was the first LP production released under Kuryokhin’s brand “Popular Mechanics” or “Pop Mekhanika”, yet it was an atypical “Pop Mekhanika” performance for a number of reasons: it included a very a small group of musicians, it was no life performance, and, most importantly, Kuryokhin and Butman used the New Composers’ pre-recorded material, which was against Pop Mekhanika’s principle of spontaneity.

10.

http://fotokto.ru/photo/view/4410276.html Interior of the Radio House, St. Petersburg, Italian Street 27 photo: Vladimir, 2016

The New Composers themselves were not present during the recording of the master tape at the Leningrad Radio House, which, by the way, had to be carried out secretly, because at that time, Kuryokhin was not yet publically recognised.

11.

Here are some more pictures from “typical” Pop Mekhanika performances from about the same time, 1986 and 1988. This one was reprinted in Vision, China

12.

Stiob appears in the form of animals on stage.

13.

If you want to know more about “typical” Pop Mekhanika performances, you can look up several performances on our homepage www.e-e.eu,

then go to “Sergey Kuryokhin and Pop Mekhanika / Popular Mechanics – all documents“

14.

“Our homepage” means the website I have been creating for artist (E-E) Evgenij Kozlov, a participant of the Venice Biennale in 2013 and a leading member of the Leningrad avant-garde group of the 1980s “The New Artists”.

16.

A large number of his works from the 1980s, among them many artists’ portraits and his Insect Culture series, were displayed at the exhibition “Notes from the Underground”, in Lodz, 2016

17.

and Berlin 2018, The exhibition was dedicated to art and alternative music in Eastern Europe 1968–1994.
I have used Kozlov’s works in this paper.

18.

Here we see Kozlov´s original photograph of the Insect Culture record cover in a coloured version. It is part of a photo shoot including 17 pictures. Here are some vintage prints from the series.

Kozlov took this picture from a pedestrian bridge on the first floor of the Leningrad “Passage” department store, looking down on the visitors. He asked Alakhov, Kuryokhin and Verichev to walk towards the bridge with quick steps. The idea was to freeze the movement with his camera, similar to Iain Macmillan’s famous picture of the Beatles crossing Abbey Road. Macmillan had also been standing above the group of musicians, on a ladder. The likeness was not accidental. Kozlov was well aware of the young musicians’ creative power.

As the focus of this panel is on stiob, I will highlight the New Composers’ contribution to Insect Culture, because their contribution constitutes the satirical and humorous aspect of the record.

19.

A characteristic feature of the New Composers’ early work is their ingenious response to what Alakhov calls “Soviet Pop art” – popular movies and records that filled public and private spaces with mediocre kitsch and pathos deemed appropriate to fulfil the needs of the “simple Soviet citizen“. In other words, shallow entertainment of a type popular all around the world, only that it didn’t possess the professional quality of Hollywood entertainment and definitely lacked glamour.

Like that of many other countries, “Soviet Pop art” remained a “local affair” – much too local for the New Composers who decided to give it a fresh look.

20.

As other young people of their generation, Alakhov and Verichev managed to become quite familiar with international trends in music – rock and pop groups, avant-garde and jazz. In their circles, Stockhausen and Kraftwerk were brand names.

21.

Some Soviet musicians possessed huge collections of Western records. For others, trading these LPs or copying them and selling the tapes was an illegal but profitable business. This picture is from the late 1970s, which means well before perestroika.

22.

Later, during perestroika, contact with Western musicians became more frequent. Here is a picture from 1987 with the New Composers and Brian Eno in Leningrad. Ten years later, when the New Composers had turned to ambient music, they would release the album Smart with Brian Eno as Special Guest.

23.

In a recent telephone conversation with Verichev, Alakhov and Kozlov, Verichev stressed the fact that he had started to pursue his passion already in school – in the seventies –, using his cassette recorder to design sounds and noises in the style of «Ummagumma» by Pink Floyd, released in 1969.

24.

In 1983, Verichev got a job as a sound engineer at the studio of the Maly Drama Theatre. In this way he gained access to huge amounts of unused or discarded tape material. His findings included film music, dialogues of animated movies, educational radio programmes, technical instructions, theatre rehearsals and more. Together with Valery Alakhov, he started his own group New Composers, re-recording the material on tape recorders via loops, pitch shifting and other technical devices.

25.

In a text from 1983, Verichev defined this method as “Versification of Information“: “The manipulation of sound information from various spheres of our life imparts to music a new and quickly changing significance.

The result of Verichev’s and Alakhov’s collaboration, distributed to their friends on cassettes, was a particular musical variety of the stiob, if we accept the definition of stiob by sociologists L. Gudkov and B Dubinin from 1994: “Stiob is a type of intellectual sarcasm, consisting in the public or written diminution of symbols, achieved by deliberately using the symbols in question within the context of a burlesque.”

26.

Here is a CD of a cassette with recordings from 1985 and 1986 called Ветер перемен / Перцепция Вербализация – Winds of Change. Perception and Verbalisation. Several tracks were used for Insect Culture.

Among them is Na mashine / In a car, taken from the musical film Песни моря “The Songs of the Sea” from 1971 see list of all songs >>.

27.

The Rumanian-Soviet coproduction, described by Internet Movie Database as “A film-review, film-concert with almost no subject and nice songs” relates the románce between a young Rumanian man and a girl from the Soviet Union, thus giving proof of the Soviet Union’s international aspirations.

The song “In a car” celebrates the happiness of driving with the loved one “in a car around the world”.

28.

Considering the almost total ban on travels outside the Soviet block, this was completely unrealistic, but the larger part of the audience was probably just dreaming of owning a car, although perhaps not of the one in the movie. The New Composers condensed the song to its essence.

In the chorus, the words “na mashine” – “in a car” – have slight variations in each of the four verses – in a car, hey my car, oh my car, stop my car. These words now overlap, as if they were hitting on each other with a slight rhythmical defect, and this creates a funny effect, like a slapstick.

Butman paraphrases the sampling with his saxophone. At the beginning we hear a fragment from Kuryokhin’s playing the synthesizer.

audio file

However, it is important to note that for the New Composers, deconstruction of meaning was not an end in itself. Just as important, if not more important, was the pleasure obtained by constructing new meaning. To be exact, the new meaning was a semantically meaningless meaning – the meaning of pure sound, achieved through the loops.

29.

I will present another example from Insect Culture The text of the first three lines of the verse is rather trivial – unless you look at it from a position of Zen-Buddhism.

“Live is beautiful, and there is nothing in the world we love more than life."

The forth line is divided, with a word in the middle that is amputated.

“But it seems that it is not under – so well understood and close is passion.”

As the last word страсть, passion,is being repeated, the pitch is reduced and the duration increases, which gives it a solemn, almost menacing tone.

You will hear the text with its specific syllable and consonant repetition. Enjoy the softness of the Zh, the hammering staccato of the T, the sublime roundness of the plosive B in combination with the I and L …

We may call this “savouring pure sound”.

Bon appetit!.

audio file

Прекрасна ты, жизнь

И ничего мы на свете так не любим, как жизнь

Что-то далекое и вместе с тем близкое

Но кажется, что непо... [непонятно? непонятное? непонято? не понять?]

...так понятна и близка страсть

The technique of syllable and consonant repetition creates a distinct aesthetic value that goes beyond the typical stiob. A stiob displays intellectual superiority in more or less subtle forms of witticism. An example of the latter is Kuryokhin’s famous TV improvisation “Lenin was a Mushroom“. But if stiob has a liberating effect, it still owns a compulsive element: it cannot let go what it needs to combat – authoritative meaning.

30.

Humour in a work of art, on the other hand, reflects the joy of achieving inner freedom. As they are breaking the pathos of the proposition with their nervous stammering, the syllable and consonant repetitions create a sort of bizarre chant, a fantastic mantric utterance – a mad sacred formula effective through the repetition of specific phonemes, not through combatting meaning.

31.

In fact, there was nothing to combat. The sentence we have just heard – “Live is beautiful, and there is nothing in the world we love more than life” had lost its meaning long ago. It had become an empty formula as the result of routine use in official political “newspeak”, the “GULAG of existence and thought”, as linguist Yuri Vorotnikov defined Soviet “newspeak” it in 2007.

Humour brings back to life what has been killed by negligence. The New Composers’ playful and unpredictable “versification” restitutes language its magic power without forcing it to bear a meaning.

32.

Humour doesn’t exist without stiob, but it assimilates and transforms it. We may say that stiob is reactive and humour is creative. In the language of dialectics, stiob is the antithesis and humour is the synthesis.

You may or may not agree with me that the fragment of “Insect Culture” we just listened to expresses humour, not stiob or witticism. This is a matter of taste. What is important is that such a difference exists.

In his book “Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More” Alexei Yurchak tries to elevate stiob to the level of “an everyday aesthetic of living”, that is, from antithesis to synthesis or “total art of living”. Yurchak believes that “In extreme cases, as with the Mitki and the necrorealists, life as a whole transformed into neverending stiob“ where “it was often impossible to tell whether it was a form of sincere support, subtle ridicule, or a peculiar mixture of the two“.

I do no agree with Yurchak. What Yurchak calls a “total art of living” with “its own stiob philosophy, language, forms of behaviour, ethical norms, styles of interaction, drinking habits, unhealthy diet, and so forth“, is actually closer to the description of a specific social code created by specific groups of a specific age who happen to be painting or film-making – an anti-urban code in the case of the Mitki, and a Soviet version of punk culture for the necrorealists. We are talking about a short period of their life, which in the case of the Mitki ended in the 1990s with a prolonged stay in the USA with the Alcoholics Anonymous. In their later years the Mitki and Necrorealists started leading a profoundly middle-class life while keeping their artistic style.

However, what is interesting in Yurchak’s romantic approach towards art is the fact that he is aware of the shortcomings of satire as a means of expressing “total art”. He therefore requires sincerity, too. But this is the same as asking Charly Chaplin to not simply play, but also sincerely believe that he is the Tramp or the Great Dictator.

33.

“Total art” is not a strategy or attitude, whether sincere or mocking or both. In 2011 (E-E) Evgenij Kozlov stated with regard to stiob: “You may ridicule the world with your tongue stretched out as long as you please. It simply means that you are just an artist, not a creator. You know nothing about great harmony, you only know how to criticise. This is the problem in modern art.”



Uploaded 18 December 2018
Last updated 27 October 2023